John Bishop is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
"Bishop shows a masterful command of the text and its nuances; but
of even greater importance is his sense of the comic flair and wit
that so distinguishes this 'funferall'; it is the mark of a true
Joycean. Because of its freshness of approach and positive
contribution, it belongs in all libraries housing even a
preliminary Wake collection."--Choice
"Mr. Bishop has ventured on the process more boldly, more
thoroughly, more imaginatively and more informedly than any of his
predecessors. He makes the text comment on itself, as it was
constructed to do; but, knowing the whole thing by heart (as I
surmise), he is able to multiply a thousandfold the concords and
discords of which a reader is aware, and to amplify them through an
impressive array of theoretical circuitry."--Robert M. Adams, New
York Times Book Review
"Though it is well known that Joyce claimed that his intention in
Finnegans Wake was to 'reconstruct the nocturnal life, ' Bishop is
the first scholar to see in this notion the key to Joyce's wildly
obscure masterpiece. His reading of Finnegans Wake as a night-book
produces a new sense of the book's form, shape, and structure. In
his reading, Freud, Vico, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead take on
new meaning, and his accounts of the geography and sexuality of the
Wake are fascinating. Bishop brings a rare command of the text to
his difficult enterprise, and the organization and prose are models
of clarity. 'You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?'
Joyce's Book of the Dark will help all serious readers of the Wake
get their bearings."--Keith Cushman, Library Journal
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