Launch of Vicki Mahaffey’s “The Joyce of Everyday Life”

Part of James Joyce’s genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, “a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment.” How might we learn to regain some of the child-like play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that comes so naturally to Joyce?

The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world.

Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.

Vicki Mahaffey is Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and the author or editor of several books, including Collaborative Dubliners: Joyce in Dialogue, Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, and States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment.

Katherine O’Callaghan is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is an elected member of the Board of Trustees of the International James Joyce Foundation. She is the editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism (Routledge, 2018, paperback edition 2020), and the co-editor, with Oona Frawley, of Memory Ireland Volume IV: James Joyce and Cultural Memory (Syracuse University Press, 2014).

Also check out other Arts events in New York, Literary Art events in New York.