Book Launch

19 November 2024 at 6.30pm

The James Joyce Centre was pleased to host the launch of The Joyce of Everyday Life (Bucknell University Press, 2024), a new book about the ordinary, extraordinary and everything in between in Joyce’s work.

On Tuesday, 19 November 2024 at 6.30pm, author Prof. Vicki Mahaffey (Urbana-Champaign) joined us for a conversation with fellow Joyce scholars Prof. Anne Fogarty (UCD) and Prof. Sam Slote (TCD), followed by a musical performance by Darina Gallagher, Director of the James Joyce Centre.

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, it shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, everchanging world.

Prof. 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.

The event was followed by a wine reception.

Vicki Mahaffey is a 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.

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.