Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett - Tapa dura

Remembering and the Sound of Words is one of the more remarkable critical studies it has been my good fortune and delight to have read. ... it should be greeted in triumph, if only for having vanquished a few recent impieties and for restoring the remembering mind to its rightful eminence. ... this is that rare instance of a critical work that waves no banners, nor proclaims a post-Derridean superiority over its ostensible subjects, but instead, quietly and unpretentiously, respects the texts it discusses, and does what criticism so rarely does, i.e. illuminating those texts by sensitive close reading. ... It is an exciting thesis, complex and ambitious, yet clearly stated and meticulously worked out. The effect is compelling. ... What is consistently impressive is not simply the range of Piette's reference, nor the precision of his detail, but the quality of the insight be brings to and derives from the texts he examines. (James Joyce Literary Supplement, 1997)

This is a resource for consultation as well as for theory. (Dorothy M. Betz, French Review)

Don't just read this book at your local culture-park. Don't just borrow it. Don't just order it for your library. Buy it. I'd even suggest stealing it, but Adam Piette deserves the royalties. You won't regret doing so. (James Joyce Literary Supplement, 1997)

Remembering the Sound of Words is a major new studyof four of modern literature's most important writers―and the first serious attempt to account for complex sound effects in prose

Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between such sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts. He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, throught a theory of alternating-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Through close analysis of Mallarmé's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finegan's Wake), and Beckett's prose and drama, Piette demonstrates that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite wide divergence in these four writers' representations of memory, the book shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all, and is emplyed in particular to express the textual migration of past key-words, self-centred comic tyranny, and the fitful unifaction of body and memory within the narrative voice. Mimesis is redefined in terms of textual rhymes―facsimiles of the complex resemblances, fusions, and re-enactments of the mind's verbal memory.