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

Collaborative Dubliners

Enigmatic, vivid, and terse, James Joyce’s Dubliners continues both to puzzle and to compel its readers. This collection of essays by thirty contributors from seven countries presents a revolutionary view of Joyce’s technique and draws out its surprisingly contemporary implications by beginning with a single unusual premise: that meaning in Joyce’s fiction is a product of engaged interaction between two or more people. Meaning is not dispensed by the author; rather, it is actively negotiated between involved and curious readers through the medium of a shared text. Here, pairs of experts on Joyce’s work produce meaning beyond the text by arguing over it, challenging one another through it, and illuminating it with relevant facts about language, history, and culture. The result is not an authoritative interpretation of Joyce’s collection of stories but an animated set of dialogues about Dubliners designed to draw the reader into its lively discussions.

Reauthorizing Joyce

An exploration of how Joyce took the potentially authoritarian discourse of narrative fiction and turned it into an authoritative, illuminating, comic, and sometimes bawdy dialogue with the reader over the heads of his character. Ranging over Joyce's entire corpus, it attempts throughout to differentiate freedom--the freedom of both the writer and the reader--from the less conscious and rewarding reflex of resistance.

In this sharp, thoughtful, and clearly-written book, modernism is not simply a descriptive category pigeon-holing a literary period; it is made both more problematic (as when its ending is linked with the Holocaust) and empowering. Boldly redefining the field, Mahaffey throws a truly original light on the social, political, and ethical relevance of main modernist 'chronicles of disorder,' showing convincingly how they challenge repressive authorities as well as the reader's ingrained passivity.
—Jean-Michel Rabaté

States of Desire: Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, and the Irish Experiment

This study shows how the writings of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce are politically subversive in the most local and dangerous sense of the term: they aim to take apart the assumptions and verbal practices that make dominance possible.