Vicki Mahaffey Lectures : "Finn Again: Huck Finn, Finn MacCool, and the Salmon; the Irish-American Odyssey of Finnegans Wake"

Please join us on Wednesday, February 22nd at 6:30 p.m in the Hurst Lounge, as Professor Vicki Mahaffey presents a lecture entitled, "Finn Again: Huck Finn, Finn MacCool, and the Salmon; the Irish-American Odyssey of Finnegans Wake."
 
 
 
Noting that James Joyce's Finnegans Wake didn't have that title until it was published, Professor Mahaffey will show how, in the final two years of composition, Joyce created an "architecture" for his book that is surprisingly similar to the macrostructure of Ulysses: the Wake, too, is a kind of odyssey.  Moreover, the book's major structural components all have some verbal stake in the name “Finnegan,” and more precisely in the word “fin” (or “finn”) with which the title begins. Not only is Finnegans Wake about death (French "fin," or end) and resurrection (“again”), but it is also about fish, designated by their fins, especially an "Irish" fish: salmon.  The salmon works in several ways to structure the book: first, it is a fish with fins; second, it is a fish that undergoes an odyssey, since it journeys back to the place it was spawned to lay its own eggs (slowly dying while it does so, since it has become a saltwater ocean fish that goes back against the current to freshwater streams). Third, the salmon in Irish mythology is the joyous equivalent and alternative to the fruit of knowledge in Judeo-Christian lore, and it is connected with another Finn, Finn MacCool, the ancient Irish hero who mistakenly tasted it, thereby acquiring the knowledge of all things.  Finally, the title is also haunted by the name of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the American boy who goes on an odyssey of his own at the age of fourteen with a runaway black slave, learning in the process something about the ethics of the white lie (or cunning fiction) of which Odysseus was the first recorded master.
 
 
 
Professor Mahaffey is the Kirkpatrick Professor of English Literature and Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign.  She is the author of Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007); States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and the Irish Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press,1998); Reauthorizing Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995); and is currently at work on a new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life.