Skip to main content
University of California Press

About the Book

While memory is one of the most fascinating faculties of consciousness, it is also one of the most mysterious. Is it memory—our own marvelous personal computer or data base—that brings us the intense feelings prompted by a certain object or situation?

Drawing on an expansive array of sources, from microbiology to cosmology, Ovid to Proust, Egyptology to the cinema, Philip Kuberski leads us on a brave and beguiling exploration of memory. He enables us to see it as a worldly process in which individuals both remember and are remembered, all in a network of associations that join our bodies, personal and cultural myths, and aesthetic and literary experiences. His essays will provide a tantalizing and thoughtful read for those interested in literature, psychology, biology, anthropology, and philosophy.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

About the Author

Philip Kuberski is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University.

Reviews

"Held together by a specific vision of memory, these essays put together sources that normally do not come into contact. I like this book a lot."—David B. Morris, author of The Culture of Pain

"Thought-provoking and even moving. . . . Superior in terms of its poetic acuteness and its range."—Jonathan Boyarin, author of Polish Jews in Paris: The Ethnography of Memory