New Reading: Notes on a Critical Phenomenology of Reading with Finnegans Wake

Abstract: In reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake , two of the many shapes that phenomenology as a method has taken during and since the twentieth century come to light. The first is its use in constructing phenomenologies of reading; the second, its use as a critique of its own methods in the form of critical phenomenology. Bringing these two strands together and using the Wake as an illustration can help us imagine what a critical phenomenology of reading might look like. The three sections following the introduction respectively "pilot" three forms of critiques of reading: the phenomenological, which is often purely descriptive and does not change our ways of reading; the critical-phenomenological, which can fall into absolute skepticism and ennui toward the text; and the one provisionally termed "new," which can be imaginative yet impossible as an academic exercise. Together, they speculate upon possibilities for new ways of bringing phenomenology into literary critique.