The Joyce of Everyday Life: Contemporary Irish Writers

James Joyce’s most important innovation was to use language to mirror the reader, enabling those willing to read with openness and active curiosity to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. His approach to language was joyful, participatory, and musical. The Joyce of Everyday Life is a celebration of language as a means of revitalizing daily experience and social interactions across a diverse, ever-changing world. It is an exercise in a different kind of literary criticism, one that is in meaningful dialogue with the issues of everyday life—sleeping, writing, lovemaking, reading, and eating. Here Vicki Mahaffey uses Joyce’s entire corpus to illustrate how we can think—and laugh—along the “veins” of language—its etymologies, sounds, imagery, allusive echoes—to reinvigorate aspects of everyday life that have become flat or mundane, while gaining greater self-acceptance and appreciation for others.