ABSTRACT
In his 1907 preface to The American, Henry James described himself taking up the thread of writing after a hiatus, when he apparently refocused his efforts to “remount the stream of composition” (p. xii). Both James’ intuition and metaphor are apt in the twenty-Šrst century, particularly in light of written expression (in any genre, from Šction to exposition to epistolary writing) conceptualized as a neuropsychological nexus of integrated factors working to construct written communication. James’ choice of verb vividly portrays the writer as an active agent, as if the writer were jockeying a host of biological brain functions to construct coherence out of the ¤ux of thought, sensation, memory, and experience. The very act of so seemingly daunting a task is further testament to the writer’s conscious and/or subconscious drive to communicate socially, which is a willful state that sets the whole complex cognitive process of writing in motion.
