Joyce’s Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses

For 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. This volume demonstrates how Joyce’s body of work, Ulysses in particular, operates as mnemotechnic , a technique for preserving and remembering the personal, social and cultural pasts. It illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, and cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period.