— PUBLISHED —
SEPTEMBER 2024
A close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions.
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Mahaffey discusses banshees in “On Dirty Sheets” and the salmon of knowledge in “On Salmon”; her experience teaching gender and sexuality leads to the shattering conclusions of “On Adultery and Virginity” and “On Fat.” Shakespeare, together with Plato and Aristotle, enrich the treatment of beds in “On Beds.” She also takes on bigger interpretive challenges in the sections “On Love” and “On Religion.”
Vicki Mahaffey Wins Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature
March 2025 | Vicki Mahaffey has been awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Books on Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies. Mahaffey’s The Joyce of Everyday Life received the prize and these are the words from the Association:
“Openly idiosyncratic in its topics (beds, glass, fat, writing by hand) and boldly philosophical in its conception of how Joyce teaches us to read with playfulness, empathy, and reflection, the committee found Vicki Mahaffey’s expansive book The Joyce of Everyday Life to be propulsive, thrilling, and original. From the etymologies and archaeologies of words, images, and letters to surprising connections ranging from Joyce’s international influences and subsequent impact to Mahaffey’s own neighbor’s garden, the insights and analyses here are both intimate and encompassing. Mahaffey takes Joyce as a subject—with a facility and knowledge that makes even Finnegans Wake accessible—but also proposes a way of reading that is intended to move beyond Joyce, with an argument about Joyce’s use of difficulty itself to make readers see themselves and others in self-reflective, even self-improving, ways. In moments of engaging intellectual autobiography, Mahaffey also conveys the revolutionary effect of Joyce on her own reading, which in turn allows us to see ourselves as potentially more self-reflective readers—an experience we found not only illuminating but inspiring and indeed transformative for us as readers, teachers, and writers.”
“Bringing a depth of scholarship and a lively interpretive voice to show how James Joyce himself read, drawing from his entire corpus for her examples.”
