ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the American Conference on Irish Studies’ Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature

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 childlike play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that come 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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

"Confident, cohesive, and successful. . . . A refreshingly new perspective that has much to offer. . . . Highly recommended."— CHOICE

"An innovative new lens through which to view Ireland's most iconic literary export anew."

— The Irish Times

"In The Joyce of Everyday Life, Mahaffey puts Joyce's entire oeuvre through a prism; she takes the words and images into which Joyce has packed so much meaning and holds that prism up to them, allowing the separate colors and layers of meaning to unfold and become apparent to her readers. In other words, her book is doing through explicating what Joyce does through complicating, untangling these threads of meaning—like Penelope unweaving the shroud—that run through not only Joyce's works but also through the history of human thought."

— Irish Literary Supplement

"Feels like a book Joyce himself might have used as a glossary of sorts to explain his own thinking, his own word choice and word construction, and his own use of symbols—the symbols of everyday life including beds, handwriting, salmon, and love. After all, 'everyday life' is a recurring theme in Joyce’s work, and this book offers an intriguing and novel way 'in.'"— Kelsey Scouten Bates, The John C. Haas Director, The Rosenbach

"A brilliant, lively guide to the joys of reading Joyce for intellectual stimulation and personal growth. With characteristic verve and lucidity, Mahaffey reminds us how Joyce’s words make us come alive to life and language as we glimpse ourselves in his nicely polished mirrors. Both new and veteran readers will benefit from Mahaffey's deep, witty engagements with Joyce’s fictions."— Robert Spoo, author of Modernism and the Law

“An ode to the necessity for interpretive autonomy, Vicki Mahaffey’s The Joyce of Everyday Life joyfully explores the networks and coincidences and echoes and repetitions of James Joyce’s texts. Where other literary critics tell what a book is about, Mahaffey shows readers how to move through Joyce’s language. They could not have a better guide."— Katherine O’Callaghan, editor of Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature: Musical Modernism

"At once a primer for reading Joyce and a parallactic rereading of familiar places in Joyce’s work. It is also a model of great reading and writing, eloquently conveying a practice of encounter, as its title suggests, with everyday subjects such as beds, love, fat, letters of all kinds, etc., through which Mahaffey brings Joyce down from the rarefied air. The book is rich with critical surprises. Don’t miss them.”— Marilyn Reizbaum, author of Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism

“Mahaffey shows that there is much to be learned about everyday life in Joyce’s fiction. However, Joyce does not drop chestnuts of wisdom for readers along a primrose path. Instead, he forges trails of potential self-discovery through a dense and thorny thicket of words. Mahaffey is the perfect guide to the rich forms of everyday self-reflection available to readers when navigating the language of Joyce’s selva oscura.”— David Rando, author of Hope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: On Living and Reading 1
1. On Beds 25
2. On Dirty Sheets 43
3. On Salmon 61
4. On Writing by Hand 79
5. On Fat 97
6. On Adultery and Virginity 113
7. On Love 133
8. On Religion (as Rereading) 145
9. On Glass 163
10. On Letters 183
11. On Closing and Opening 205
Epilogue: The Everyday 215
Acknowledgments 223
Notes 225
Bibliography 249
Index 259