Finnegans Wake - James Joyce

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Résumé :
Finnegans Wake is one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon.There are four Parts or Books and seventeen chapters total in Finnegans Wake. The chapters lack titles, and while Joyce didn't offer potential chapter titles as he had for Ulysses, he did give titles to several portions that were published separately. Part 1: Dublin hod carrier Finnegan, Joyce's central figure, perishes after falling from a ladder while building a wall. HCE's wife ALP accuses him of being a scam after having her son Shem transcribe a letter about him and give it to another son Shaun. Part 2: The primary protagonists are Shem, Shaun, and Issy, who are banished from their home by their parents after they misjudged the color of a girl's eyes based on their gaze work. HCE is a Norwegian Captain who, via his marriage to a tailor's daughter, became domesticated. Part 3: The Four Masters' Ass describes how he believed he had heard and seen Shaun the Post's ghost while he was falling asleep. Part 4: The book is written as a collection of short stories, and it opens with a plea for daybreak. The river Liffey, represented by ALP, flows into the ocean at dawn to mark the end of Part IV.

Biographie:
James Joyce (1882 - 1941) was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a well-meaning but financially inept father and a solemn, pious mother. One of the most revered writers of the 20th century, he was noted for his experimental use of language in his works. His first publication, an essay on Ibsen's play, appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1900. In 1904, he made his first attempt at a novel, Stephen Hero and also attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected. At the outset of the First World War, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he wrote Exiles, reworked on the early chapters of Ulysses and published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a serial form. It appeared in twenty-five instalments in The Egoist. Almost a complete rewrite of the abandoned Stephen Hero, it is heavily autobiographical incorporating the techniques of stream of consciousness and interior monologue....