This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalis... more This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
It is presented here the translation of the article “‘Sunflawered’ Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Na... more It is presented here the translation of the article “‘Sunflawered’ Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Nature, Existential Shame and Transcendence”, by the American critic James Fairhall. The article is part of the collection entitled Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, edited by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin, published in 2014. The issue is an important contribution to Joyce’s studies, especially because it highlights the ecological awareness that can be perceived in the writing of James Joyce. The purpose of this article’s translation into Brazilian Portuguese was to bring some aspects of the recent debates about Joyce’s work from the perspective of ecocriticism. Starting from Joyce’s last novel, Fairhall discusses about humanity in its transcendent dimension and, at the same time, bound to the shame provoked by the needs of the body.
G Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is an exemplar of that continually surprising genre, the study t... more G Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is an exemplar of that continually surprising genre, the study that takes a Joycean topic we thought we knew well and re-opens it in an illuminating investigation that changes our understanding of Joyce’s writing. Winston begins with a sensitive analysis of Richard Moynan’s painting, Military Manoeuvres, which encapsulates some of the tensions in Britain’s militarized colony.1 Each of Joyce’s major works appeared in a year of significant armed conflict in Ireland or the Continent; yet, as Winston shows, his oeuvre goes far beyond merely registering these conflicts. Winston takes as his subject Joyce’s fictional investigation of the pervasiveness of militarism in cultural fields such as “education, athletics, marriage and family life, sexual commerce, and public space” (5). In his introduction, he situates the adolescent essay “Force”/”Subjugation” (CW 17-24) as an overture to Joyce’s lifelong exploration of this topic. He grounds the term “militarism” (parallel to “terrorism” today) in the cultural context of the early twentieth century. His main argument advances through six chapters focusing on the militarism debate and exploring the ties between militarism and athleticism, British/Irish school curricula, patriarchal domestic life, and the British Army garrison and Dublin’s red-light district. The final chapter examines how Joyce’s fiction reappropriates Dublin from the historical structures of force and subjugation characterizing it at the fin-de-siècle. Chapter 1, “Joyce and Ideas of Militarism,” commences with the one-sided debate over “Two Gallants” that Joyce set up with his publisher Grant Richards’s printer, whom he cast as an unconscious adherent of old-fashioned notions of gallantry and thus as “a militarist” (ix). Winston contextualizes the contradictory meanings of the term “militarism” in European public discourse prior to and during the Great War. A history of militarism, from the term’s coinage by a critic of Napoleon’s regime, leads to Guglielmo Ferrero’s writings on the subject.2 Winston’s analysis of this signal influence on Joyce as a young man is succinct and yet rich. Residing in Pola and Trieste, Joyce saw the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s militarism in action as it competed in the arms race among Europe’s great powers. The most insidious effect of this ideology, apart from war, was its pervasiveness in everyday life. Winston observes that Ferrero’s discussion of the diverse aspects of culture permeated by militarization— ”domestic life, sport and leisure activities, architectural and urban
Most of James Joyce’s narratives unfold against the backdrop of Dublin’s manmade structures and s... more Most of James Joyce’s narratives unfold against the backdrop of Dublin’s manmade structures and systems—what the historian William Cronon calls ‘‘second nature’’1 in Nature’s Metropolis, his book about Chicago. Urban second nature arises from and interacts constantly with the phenomena of biological nature, and Dublin has always contained plenty of interesting examples of this interrelationship, such as wildflowers on canal walls2 or the diverse bird species of North Bull Island.3 Joyce’s fiction is not much concerned with Dublin flowers (except the symbolic kind) or birds or wild, nonhuman nature. It concerns itself deeply, however, with the locus of the human experience of nature: the body. Critics have long been aware of the near-clinical interest that Joyce, a former medical student, invested in his descriptions of bodily processes. Indeed, the body as a major theme in his writing is a well-established area of inquiry.4 Yet Joyceans and other literary critics, even some ecocritics,5 appear to share a deep-seated Western philosophical ambivalence about the relationship between the natural and the human. As Kate Soper observes, ‘‘We have thought . . . of humanity as being a component of nature even as we have conceptualized nature as absolute otherness to humanity.’’6 This ambivalence is emotionally and intellectually fraught. It is a way of acknowledging yet repressing the fact that humans, in spite of our drive to transcend nature, are continually pulled back into our physical selves by natural laws whose impingement we feel to be, at times, alien and shame-provoking. In this essay I will take a trans-corporeal7 approach, inflected by ecofeminist phenomenology, to understanding Joyce’s treatment of nature-body relations. By shame, I mean the feeling aroused by the vulnerability, limitations, and necessities of our existence
Abstract: An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s r... more Abstract: An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationship to other bodies, both human and nonhuman. Gabriel Conroy’s drive toward patriarchal mastery over women and, by extension, nature depends on his denial of his deep connectedness with them. The story moves toward his epiphany of intercorporeal identification with other people, including his wife Gretta, as fellow mortal creatures circumscribed by nature’s most powerful force, time. A related epiphany, not conscious but felt and implicit, is his trans-corporeal identification with aspects of nonhuman nature: snow, water, the Bog of Allen, and the treeless hills of the West where Gretta’s young lover, Michael Furey, lies buried. Thus the breaking down of his psychological defenses against threats to his wished-for mastery leads to an acknowledgment of nonhuman nature as a force both within and outside him—a force that complicates the boundary between Gabriel and not-Gabriel in an even more radical way than his recognition of kinship with other, both living and dead, human beings. This essay also addresses Joyce’s and Ireland’s “bog consciousness,” which it relates to Joyce’s 1906–1907 sojourn in Rome and that city’s notorious “Roman fever,” actually malaria, associated with the Tiber River and the Pontine Marshes.
An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationshi... more An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationship to other bodies, both human and nonhuman. Gabriel Conroy’s drive toward patriarchal mastery over women and, by extension, nature depends on his denial of his deep connectedness with them. The story moves toward his epiphany of intercorporeal identification with other people, including his wife Gretta, as fellow mortal creatures circumscribed by nature’s most powerful force, time. A related epiphany, not conscious but felt and implicit, is his trans-corporeal identification with aspects of nonhuman nature: snow, water, the Bog of Allen, and the treeless hills of the West where Gretta’s young lover, Michael Furey, lies buried. Thus the breaking down of his psychological defenses against threats to his wished-for mastery leads to an acknowledgment of nonhuman nature as a force both within and outside him—a force that complicates the boundary between Gabriel and not-Gabriel in an even more radical way than his recognition of kinship with other, both living and dead human beings. This essay also addresses Joyce’s and Ireland’s “bog consciousness,” which it relates to Joyce’s 1906-07 sojourn in Rome and that city’s notorious “Roman fever,” actually malaria, associated with the Tiber River and the Pontine Marshes.
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalis... more This article explores the ecological and ideological context of a passage in which two nationalists lament Ireland's treeless state. Although Joyce satirises these professed tree-lovers and the cause of reforestation, the passage alludes to a lively, serious topic in fin de siècle discourse. While Catholic nationalists blamed the loss of the island's once-vast, oak-dominated forests on British colonialism, a history elided by unionists, they shared a belief in the economic benefits of reforestation. Like Joyce, both sides knew little of Ireland's post-Ice Age natural history and did not appreciate the cultural importance of forest ecosystems to ancient Celtic peoples. Today, the Republic's profit-based plantations of conifers enact the materialist ideology of c.1904 reforestation advocates while overlooking the environmental and cultural benefits of restoring the biodiversity of native deciduous forests.
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
It is presented here the translation of the article “‘Sunflawered’ Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Na... more It is presented here the translation of the article “‘Sunflawered’ Humanity in Finnegans Wake: Nature, Existential Shame and Transcendence”, by the American critic James Fairhall. The article is part of the collection entitled Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce, edited by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin, published in 2014. The issue is an important contribution to Joyce’s studies, especially because it highlights the ecological awareness that can be perceived in the writing of James Joyce. The purpose of this article’s translation into Brazilian Portuguese was to bring some aspects of the recent debates about Joyce’s work from the perspective of ecocriticism. Starting from Joyce’s last novel, Fairhall discusses about humanity in its transcendent dimension and, at the same time, bound to the shame provoked by the needs of the body.
G Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is an exemplar of that continually surprising genre, the study t... more G Winston’s Joyce and Militarism is an exemplar of that continually surprising genre, the study that takes a Joycean topic we thought we knew well and re-opens it in an illuminating investigation that changes our understanding of Joyce’s writing. Winston begins with a sensitive analysis of Richard Moynan’s painting, Military Manoeuvres, which encapsulates some of the tensions in Britain’s militarized colony.1 Each of Joyce’s major works appeared in a year of significant armed conflict in Ireland or the Continent; yet, as Winston shows, his oeuvre goes far beyond merely registering these conflicts. Winston takes as his subject Joyce’s fictional investigation of the pervasiveness of militarism in cultural fields such as “education, athletics, marriage and family life, sexual commerce, and public space” (5). In his introduction, he situates the adolescent essay “Force”/”Subjugation” (CW 17-24) as an overture to Joyce’s lifelong exploration of this topic. He grounds the term “militarism” (parallel to “terrorism” today) in the cultural context of the early twentieth century. His main argument advances through six chapters focusing on the militarism debate and exploring the ties between militarism and athleticism, British/Irish school curricula, patriarchal domestic life, and the British Army garrison and Dublin’s red-light district. The final chapter examines how Joyce’s fiction reappropriates Dublin from the historical structures of force and subjugation characterizing it at the fin-de-siècle. Chapter 1, “Joyce and Ideas of Militarism,” commences with the one-sided debate over “Two Gallants” that Joyce set up with his publisher Grant Richards’s printer, whom he cast as an unconscious adherent of old-fashioned notions of gallantry and thus as “a militarist” (ix). Winston contextualizes the contradictory meanings of the term “militarism” in European public discourse prior to and during the Great War. A history of militarism, from the term’s coinage by a critic of Napoleon’s regime, leads to Guglielmo Ferrero’s writings on the subject.2 Winston’s analysis of this signal influence on Joyce as a young man is succinct and yet rich. Residing in Pola and Trieste, Joyce saw the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s militarism in action as it competed in the arms race among Europe’s great powers. The most insidious effect of this ideology, apart from war, was its pervasiveness in everyday life. Winston observes that Ferrero’s discussion of the diverse aspects of culture permeated by militarization— ”domestic life, sport and leisure activities, architectural and urban
Most of James Joyce’s narratives unfold against the backdrop of Dublin’s manmade structures and s... more Most of James Joyce’s narratives unfold against the backdrop of Dublin’s manmade structures and systems—what the historian William Cronon calls ‘‘second nature’’1 in Nature’s Metropolis, his book about Chicago. Urban second nature arises from and interacts constantly with the phenomena of biological nature, and Dublin has always contained plenty of interesting examples of this interrelationship, such as wildflowers on canal walls2 or the diverse bird species of North Bull Island.3 Joyce’s fiction is not much concerned with Dublin flowers (except the symbolic kind) or birds or wild, nonhuman nature. It concerns itself deeply, however, with the locus of the human experience of nature: the body. Critics have long been aware of the near-clinical interest that Joyce, a former medical student, invested in his descriptions of bodily processes. Indeed, the body as a major theme in his writing is a well-established area of inquiry.4 Yet Joyceans and other literary critics, even some ecocritics,5 appear to share a deep-seated Western philosophical ambivalence about the relationship between the natural and the human. As Kate Soper observes, ‘‘We have thought . . . of humanity as being a component of nature even as we have conceptualized nature as absolute otherness to humanity.’’6 This ambivalence is emotionally and intellectually fraught. It is a way of acknowledging yet repressing the fact that humans, in spite of our drive to transcend nature, are continually pulled back into our physical selves by natural laws whose impingement we feel to be, at times, alien and shame-provoking. In this essay I will take a trans-corporeal7 approach, inflected by ecofeminist phenomenology, to understanding Joyce’s treatment of nature-body relations. By shame, I mean the feeling aroused by the vulnerability, limitations, and necessities of our existence
Abstract: An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s r... more Abstract: An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationship to other bodies, both human and nonhuman. Gabriel Conroy’s drive toward patriarchal mastery over women and, by extension, nature depends on his denial of his deep connectedness with them. The story moves toward his epiphany of intercorporeal identification with other people, including his wife Gretta, as fellow mortal creatures circumscribed by nature’s most powerful force, time. A related epiphany, not conscious but felt and implicit, is his trans-corporeal identification with aspects of nonhuman nature: snow, water, the Bog of Allen, and the treeless hills of the West where Gretta’s young lover, Michael Furey, lies buried. Thus the breaking down of his psychological defenses against threats to his wished-for mastery leads to an acknowledgment of nonhuman nature as a force both within and outside him—a force that complicates the boundary between Gabriel and not-Gabriel in an even more radical way than his recognition of kinship with other, both living and dead, human beings. This essay also addresses Joyce’s and Ireland’s “bog consciousness,” which it relates to Joyce’s 1906–1907 sojourn in Rome and that city’s notorious “Roman fever,” actually malaria, associated with the Tiber River and the Pontine Marshes.
An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationshi... more An important subtext of Joyce’s “The Dead” deals with nature, particularly the body’s relationship to other bodies, both human and nonhuman. Gabriel Conroy’s drive toward patriarchal mastery over women and, by extension, nature depends on his denial of his deep connectedness with them. The story moves toward his epiphany of intercorporeal identification with other people, including his wife Gretta, as fellow mortal creatures circumscribed by nature’s most powerful force, time. A related epiphany, not conscious but felt and implicit, is his trans-corporeal identification with aspects of nonhuman nature: snow, water, the Bog of Allen, and the treeless hills of the West where Gretta’s young lover, Michael Furey, lies buried. Thus the breaking down of his psychological defenses against threats to his wished-for mastery leads to an acknowledgment of nonhuman nature as a force both within and outside him—a force that complicates the boundary between Gabriel and not-Gabriel in an even more radical way than his recognition of kinship with other, both living and dead human beings. This essay also addresses Joyce’s and Ireland’s “bog consciousness,” which it relates to Joyce’s 1906-07 sojourn in Rome and that city’s notorious “Roman fever,” actually malaria, associated with the Tiber River and the Pontine Marshes.
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of Jame... more Page 1. James Joyce and the question of history James Fairhall Page 2. Page 3. This study of James Joyce's fiction as a response to Irish and European history exemplifies Fredric Jameson's injunction, "Always historici/c!" James ...
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