We are pleased to announce that Nell Wasserstrom (University of Lausanne) will be the third speaker in our new Online Lecture Series.
Nell Wasserstrom’s lecture “‘Passencore’: Figures of Belatedness in Finnegans Wake” will take place on Friday, September 18, 2026, at 6.30 p.m. Zurich time.
This talk is part of a larger book project on the relation among late style, late modernism, and psychoanalytic theories of belated temporality. Taking Joyce’s portmanteau, “passencore,” as my starting point, I explore the traces of its too soon/too late logic as it repeats at crucial moments throughout the novel. Joyce’s disdain of psychoanalysis has been well-documented; however, it is also true that he was reading and taking fastidious notes on the “Wolf Man” after its publication by the Hogarth Press in 1925. This is the case-history that most thoroughly explores Nachträglichkeit (known in English as deferred action and in French as après-coup) and its relation to a primal scene grounded in the oedipal drama. While scholars have typically attributed the importance of the “Wolf Man” to the composition of Chapter IV of Book III of the Wake, in which the children voyeuristically observe their parents in the sexual act, I suggest a different locus for the primal scene and the repetition compulsion it induces. Following the traces of the text’s passencore logic, I explore how in the Wake, Nachträglichkeit is explicitly linked to Ireland’s colonial status and to Joyce’s early diagnosis of belatedness as a cultural pathology of the Irish under colonial conditions.
Contact us at info@joycefoundation.ch if you’d like to join the event!
The Zurich James Joyce Foundation Online Lecture Series is kindly supported by the Embassy of Ireland, Switzerland.
