EVENTS

 

COMING UP!

 

 

Wednesday, March 19, 2025 | Vicki Mahaffey on James Joyce | Caxton Club

Featuring: Vicki Mahaffey, Clayton and Thelma Kirkpatrick Professor of English, emerita

Wed 03/19/2025 5:30PM CT
Union League Club,
65 W. Jackson Blvd.
Chicago, IL 60604

Registration (depends on selected options)

  • Live Attendance – $60.00
    In-person at the Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson Blvd.

    Social period: 5:30–6:30 PM CT
    Program 6:30 PM CT
    Buffet dinner to follow.


Thursday, March 20, 2025 | Book Launch | Glucksman Ireland House, NYU

7:00pm - 8:30pm
Glucksman Ireland House
1 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003

Join us for a conversation with Vicki Mahaffey and Katherine O'Callaghan to launch 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).


EVENTS ARCHIVE

November 19, 2024 | James Joyce Centre, Dublin

The James Joyce Centre hosted 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, 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.

 

 

November 12, 2024 | James Joyce Society, New York

Vicki Mahaffey, Book Launch: "The Joyce of Everyday Life"
Please join the JJS in celebrating Vicki Mahaffey’s new book,
The Joyce of Everyday Life, now out from Bucknell University Press.