For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity & a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition & narration, & the connective tissue of...
For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity & a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition & narration, & the connective tissue of cultural tradition. In Joyce's Book of Memory John S. Rickard demonstrates how Joyce's body of work-Ulysses in particular-operates as a "mnemotechnic," a technique for preserving & remembering personal, social, & cultural pasts. Offering a detailed reading of Joyce & his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses & analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting & repression, as well as the deadliness of nostalgia & habit in Joyce's paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce's mnemotechnic within its historical & philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses' connection to medieval, modern, & (what would become) postmodern world-views, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective & universal memory. Finally, Joyce's Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, & cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period. This book will interest students & scholars of Joyce, as well as those engaged in the study of modern & postmodern literature.