The James Joyce Society presents:

Vicki Mahaffey, online book launch for The Joyce of Everyday Life

in conversation with Jonathan Goldman, JJS president

This is a remote event. RSVP here (required) to receive the remote link

Vicki Mahaffey is Kirkpatrick Professor of English and Gender and Women's Studies, emerita, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Professor of English, emerita, at the University of Pennsylvania. A Guggenheim fellow, she has written and edited several books on Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, Modernist Literature, and Irish Literature. She is currently editing a special issue for the James Joyce Quarterly on Joyce and Women. 

Please RSVP here.

Few works of literature are as closely linked to specific physical space as Ulysses is linked to Dublin. Throughout Ulysses, named characters often stand at or walk past a clearly specified, mappable point: an intersection, address, or business. In response, the novel is mapped, guidebooks to Joyce’s Dublin are published, and Bloomsday celebrants reenact scenes at the locations where they are set. Analyses of this aspect of Ulysses often characterize Joyce or the reader as city surveyor, census taker, or local. In contrast, I consider this mappable detail in relation to the network of informants and police that appears throughout Ulysses. Contrasting the Dublin of Ulysses with the London of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I argue that Joyce’s representation of Dublin and many of its residents interpellates readers into the novel’s intelligence subplot. By framing readers as complicit in this source of conflict in the novel, Ulysses models a decolonial method of reader manipulation and (dis)identification.

Eric A. Lewis is a lecturer in the Department of English at Georgia State University. His research focuses on readers' relationships with characters in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Global Anglophone fiction, especially out of Ireland and South Africa. His work has been published in Interventions: The International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. His book manuscript, Complicit Reading, argues that postcolonial novels use a variety of narrative techniques to complicate reader-character relationships and frame readers as complicit in conflicts in the novel and in the novel's real historical context. He also cohosts the Ulysses discussion podcast tipsyturvy Ulysses with Shinjini Chattopadhyay and Wendy Truran.

Alison Armstrong’s talk will explore Jolas’s transition magazine as a modernist vehicle for experiments with language and in the other arts. Joyce’s “Work in Progress” would become Finnegans Wake and was arguably the most important and interesting of all the linguistic experiments. 

Alison Armstrong is a writer and visual artist. Her book-length publications include the literary cookbook, The Joyce of Cooking (Station Hill 1986) and “The Herne’s Egg” by W.B. Yeats: The Manuscript Materials (Cornell UP 1993), as well as works of fiction, memoir, and criticism. Her criticism and reviews have appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, the James Joyce Broadsheet, and American Arts Quarterly, among other venues. She is currently developing a series of large pastel drawings of prehistoric stones found at sites in Ireland, including the Boyne Valley.   

The James Joyce Society announces its annual Joyce birthday event at the Morgan Library and Museum featuring Mary Burke

Free for Joyce Society and Morgan Library members. Joyce Society members and guests, RSVP (required) here: https://forms.gle/r5FibyPFqcnuynMV8

Long excluded from Ireland’s internationally recognized modernist canon, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s 1949 novel, Cré na Cille (usually translated as Graveyard Soil) is a late modernist western seaboard rejoinder to Ulysses in the Irish (Gaelic) language. Cré na Cille is set in Connemara, fetishized since Joyce’s lifetime as the linguistically and racially “pure” western heart of Gaelic Ireland. Joyce’s “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages” inadvertently implies that the avant-garde was alien to a native language that was increasingly being hitched to the fantasy of a culturally, racially, and linguistically sealed West. However, Cré na Cille’s neologisms, French and English loan words, and mixed-race returned emigrant Connemara residents acknowledge the exchanges that arose from Ireland’s history of emigration and Empire. Altogether, Ó Cadhain continues the debate initiated by Joyce’s creation of a Jewish Irishman, extending it to prophetically ask if Irish culture can create imaginative and linguistic room - in either of its official languages - for Irish citizens of minority identity. This talk will close by considering issues of race, immigration, and the teaching and speaking of the Irish language in contemporary Ireland and Irish America.

Mary Burke, Professor of English at UConn, is the author of Race, Politics, and Irish America: A Gothic History (2023) as well as a cultural history of Irish Travellers (both Oxford University Press). She collaborated with Tramp Press on the 2022 reissue of Traveller-Romany Juanita Casey’s cult novel, The Horse of Selene. Her work has placed with JJQ, NPR, the Irish Times, Irish national broadcaster RTÉ, and Faber. A former University of Notre Dame NEH Irish Fellow, she was a 2022 LRH Fellow at her alma mater, Trinity College Dublin.