James McConkey is a writer and teacher who has been associated with Cornell University since 1956, most recently
as the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature. He is the author of many books, including To a Distant Island,
Rowan's Progress, and Stories of My Life with the Other Animals, the concluding volume of the acclaimed autobiographical
series Court of Memory.
Review
"An engrossing treasury of commentaries on memory as the necessary condition of individual and cultural
identity, and as the provider of the materials and themes of our philosophies, religions, and literary creations.
For each of the diverse selections from St. Augustine to Toni Morrison, McConkey has provided a compact, pointed,
and luminous introduction."
--M. H. Abrams, author of The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Transcendentalism, and general editor of The Norton
Anthology of English Literature.
"It's altogether fitting that the author of Court of Memory and one of our best novelists, James McConkey,
should have put together this invaluable anthology of writers remembering and writing about memory. From St. Augustine,
with whome the 'anatomy' begins and ends, to Proust, Nabokov, James Agee and many others from this century, the
anthology is never less than fascinating. An imaginative and substantial piece of compilation on McConkey's part."
--William H. Pritchard, Department of English, Amherst College, and author of English Papers: A Teaching Life
and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered
"Scientists, poets, essaysists, philosphers, novelists, theologians parade through this anthology in a display
of diverse perspectives and related insight that is dazzling in its coherent complexity. Held together by the interweaving
of the editor's masterful voice, this vast array and disposition of materials creates an experience for the reader
in which tradition and innovation, the familiar and the strange, the insights for all time and the ceaselessly
transforming discoveries are in continual juxtaposition. One discovers in working one's way through this monumental
edifice that its architecture embodies the very dynamic and multi-faceted character that is the nature of its subject,
as revealed through Professor McConkey's very special intelligence."
--Elizabeth Coleman, President, Bennington College
"This is one of the small handful of truly great anthologies. It presents us with a wide range of modern thought
and writing on the nature and importance of memory, a sort of United Nations of writers concerned with a subject
which they and McConkey understand as a central--perhaps the central--aspect of the human condition. From a vast
array of separate and different cultural voices, memory emerges again and again as the key to one's identity, the
key to what we call mind, and the key to what we would like to call soul. McConkey is a modern Proust, and this
book is a collective remembrance of things past. Here is a world of particular individual voices, each one saying,
in a fresh and different way, 'we are what we were.'"
--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire
"Within each category and between categories the selections interresonate and encourage not linear but radial
exploration, sunwheels of exploration and speculation."
--The Boston Book Review
"In this anthology...McConkey provides brief introduction to reflections by novelists, scientists, and philosophers,
each of whom consider some aspect of that most precious of all the brain's activities. The result is an entertaining
and exhilarating volume, certainly one that's hard to forget."
--The Washington Post
"One of the small handful of truly great anthologies."
--Robert D. Richardson, Jr., author of Henry Thoreau and Emerson
"Scientists, poets, essayists, philosophers, novelists, theologians parade through this anthology in a display
of diverse perspectives and related insight that is dazzling in its coherent complexity."
--Elizabeth Coleman, President of Bennington College
"[An] invaluable anthology of writers remembering and writing about memory."
--William H. Pritchard, Amherst College
"McConkey draws on sources as varied as St. Augustine, Toni Morrison, Carl Jung, and M.F.K. Fisher to present
the basic neurological function as a rich tapestry of human individuality, creativity, and spirituality."
--U.S. News & World Report
Oxford University Press Web Site, May, 2000
Summary
A rich selection of writings that illuminate the nature of memory and the varied roles it plays in our lives.
Memory is astonishing and elusive--its threads intricately woven and infinitely complicated. It makes intelligible
the chaos of experience; it feeds our creativity and shapes our daily judgments, our spiritual apprehensions, our
desires. It is the essential element of human consciousness, the key to our personality, and the linchpin of our
sense of who we are.
In The Anatomy of Memory James McConkey has assembled a rich selection of writings that illuminate the nature of
memory and the varied roles it plays in our lives. Ranging from the scientific to the humanistic--from "hardwiring"
and the complex functions of the brain, to the value of memory in human life--The Anatomy of Memory brings us insights
from some of the most revered writers and thinkers of the past and present. We read of St. Augustine's struggle
in Confessions to comprehend his memory; of Jung's theory of the collective unconscious; of Lewis Thomas's understanding
in The Lives of the Cell of memory at its most basic level, that of the cell. McConkey includes the poetry of Marianne
Moore and William Butler Yeats; and excerpts from works as diverse as James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son, Vladimir
Nabokov's Speak, Memory, and Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Indeed, each of these writers has turned
to memory to make sense of his or her own life, to understand the phenomenal world, and to discover the balance
only memory can provide. Not least important are McConkey's own extensive introductions to every piece in the book--gems
of insight formed by a lifetime of reflection on writers such as Anton Chekhov, E. B. White, Marcel Proust, E.
M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Maya Angelou, William James, Norman Maclean, Eudora Welty, and many
others.
James McConkey is ideally suited to illuminate the nature of memory. His fiction as well as his non-fiction is
in effect a lifelong meditation on memory, on the process by which we come to deeper levels of self-understanding
through periodic looks backward at the events that have shaped us, a theme he explored most profoundly in his much-praised
Court of Memory. Now, in The Anatomy of Memory, he provides a powerful assessment of the ways memory unifies disparate
experiences, creates a synthesis out of chaos, and binds together a self, a family, a culture, and indeed all humanity.
That assessment is abetted by the unique structure of this anthology, its six sections building on each other,
each contributing to a comprehensive understanding of memory's essential role in human life.
James McConkey is the celebrated author of the much-praised Court of Memory
