Joyce's Book of Memory

For James Joyce, perhaps the most crucial of all human faculties was memory. It represented both the central thread of identity and a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition and narration, and 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 and remembering the personal, social, and cultural pasts. Offering a detailed reading of Joyce and his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses and analyses its role in the formation of personal identity, the importance of forgetting and repression, and the deadliness of nostalgia and habit in Joyce's paralysed Dublin. Rickard also notes the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection by locating Joyce's mnemotechnic within its historical and philosophical contexts. Finally, Joyce's Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, and cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period. This book will interest students and scholars of Joyce, as well as others engaged in the study of modern and postmodern literature.