Abstract
This essay discusses two well-established medievalist sources for Finnegans Wake, French philologist Joseph Bédier’s Roman de Tristan et Iseut and Sir Edward Sullivan’s manuscript study The Book of Kells. Asking how Joyce interprets this material, the article establishes a relationship whereby the text strategically corrupts his sources to engender the experience of encountering a text as a philologist. By discussing the ideological commitments of these scholars, in particular Joseph Bédier, the essay posits that this philological experience has a democratizing effect: it inverts the nationalistic logic underpinning the discipline, evinced even in Bédier’s ‘best-text method’. Finnegans Wake’s own ‘worst-text method’, contrastingly, displays a commitment to re-envisioning and modifying readerly experience by renewing medieval textuality for a contemporary readership.
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