Working on Texts

Abstract

If reading is inevitably always an experiment, reading literary masterpieces gains one access to a linguistic and semiotic universe that baffles hermeneutic authority, as well as any attempt to propose definitive interpretations. What is good about reading is that it is simultaneously a statement of subjectivity and recognition of the other as a different interpreter of the same signs. Every reading is therefore always provisional. Working on Texts provides some old and new readings of famous literary masterpieces by authors such as John Donne, S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney.

About the Author

Enrico Terrinoni is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University for Foreigners of Perugia. He holds a doctorate from University College Dublin, where he worked on a dissertation on "Joyce, Neoplatonism, and the Occult". He was awarded an Irish Government IRCHSS Research Fellowship at UCD and offered a Long Hub Room Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. He was also the Mendel Fellow at Indiana University for the Summer of 2008. He is the author of several book-length studies and essays on Joyce, including a book on Ulysses (Occult Joyce, 2007). Dr. Terrinoni's annotated Italian translation of Joyce's Ulysses came out in January 2012, and he is also the Italian translator of authors such as Muriel Spark, Brendan Behan, Gerard Mannix Flynn, B.S. Johnson, John Burnside, Miguel Siyuco, and Peter Murphy. He's currently working on a book entitled In Joyce's Glass Darkly: How to Read Ulysses and Why, planned to be out in 2013.