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...