Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of UlyssesDuke University Press, 1999 M01 6 - 240 pages 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 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 analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting and repression, and the deadliness of nostalgia and habit in Joyce’s paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce’s mnemotechnic within its historical and philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses’ connection to medieval, modern, and (what would become) postmodern worldviews, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective and universal memory. 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. |
From inside the book
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Page 4
... implied by or incorporated into the text . Ulysses contains the conscious and unconscious assumptions and conflicts about mind and memory encountered by a modern Irish writer well - read in a num- ber of traditions , including Classical ...
... implied by or incorporated into the text . Ulysses contains the conscious and unconscious assumptions and conflicts about mind and memory encountered by a modern Irish writer well - read in a num- ber of traditions , including Classical ...
Page 6
... imply that randomness and incoherence may in fact be the ultimate grounds of human experience . One example of this sort of contradiction in Ulysses is the tension between different models of evolution that seems to have influenced not ...
... imply that randomness and incoherence may in fact be the ultimate grounds of human experience . One example of this sort of contradiction in Ulysses is the tension between different models of evolution that seems to have influenced not ...
Page 8
... implication of conscious agency and authorial control ) and into the area covered by contemporary investigations of intertextuality , 10 with their assumption that the agency of one text upon another operates often in an uncon- scious ...
... implication of conscious agency and authorial control ) and into the area covered by contemporary investigations of intertextuality , 10 with their assumption that the agency of one text upon another operates often in an uncon- scious ...
Page 9
... implied by com- plex texts such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , and Finnegans Wake . In Remembering : A Phenomenological Study , Edward S. Casey has introduced a useful distinction between what he sees as the two ...
... implied by com- plex texts such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , and Finnegans Wake . In Remembering : A Phenomenological Study , Edward S. Casey has introduced a useful distinction between what he sees as the two ...
Page 11
... implied above , we can see how the novel stages the clash of conflicting paradigms and how , in its incorporation of activist models of memory , Ulysses cre- ates a " textual unconscious , " 14 or textual memory , 15 that preserves and ...
... implied above , we can see how the novel stages the clash of conflicting paradigms and how , in its incorporation of activist models of memory , Ulysses cre- ates a " textual unconscious , " 14 or textual memory , 15 that preserves and ...
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Common terms and phrases
allusion argues Artist associations become Bergson Bloom and Stephen Bruno's Budgen chance characters Circe claims consciousness Creative Evolution cultural unconscious dead destiny Dignam's Dublin echoes élan vital eleven Ellmann entelechy essay example experience father Finnegans Wake force Freud Gerty ghost Golden Ass guilt habit Hamlet Herr human ideas identity images imagination intertextual involuntary memory Ithaca James Joyce Joyce's texts Joyce's Ulysses Joyce's writing Leopold Bloom Lestrygonians magic Maher's memory in Ulysses metempsychosis models of mind modern modernist Molly mother mourning narrative nature Nausicaa nostalgia notes notion novel Nymph Odyssey paralyzed past Portrait present Proust provides Psyche psychic reader reading recollection remember repressed Richard Ellmann Rudy Rudy's death sense sexual Shakespeare shared memories soul Stephen and Bloom Stephen Dedalus Stephen's riddle suggests symbols tension text of Ulysses textual memory theory Theosophical thinks thoughts tion traditional Trieste Ulysses University Press voluntary Wandering Rocks words