Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce ed. by Robert Brazeau and Derek Gladwin (review)

In a critical scenario where the environmental humanities have by now secured a prominent position, it is time for a reappraisal of Joyce's work through the lenses of ecocriticism. This is indeed what Eco-Joyce proposes: an often surprising and unexpected rereading of Joyce through the contexts and the discourses provided by contemporary ecocritical insights. The result is a two-fold, double-tracked discussion developed in the book. On the one hand, the outlines of a new reading of the Joycean canon emerges here. On the other, a parallel discussion develops about what ecocriticism might achieve: should it be an ethical or a political discourse, what are its aims, and what does it offer, or what is it offered by, the humanities. The essays collected here are valuable exactly because they take the reader along the many branches of ecocriticism and then exemplify these critical paths in the reading practices of each contributor. Joyce's work becomes a test-case for the encounter of Irish modernist literature and the ecocritical.

The essays are divided into three sections: "Nature and Environmental Consciousness in Joyce's Fiction," "Joyce and The Urban Environment," and "Joyce, Somatic Ecology and The Body." The sections are preceded by two important interventions: Anne Fogarty's "Foreword" and the editors' "Introduction: James Joyce and Ecocriticism." Fogarty convincingly sets the pace for the whole book by explaining in what way a writer whose work is eminently urban can be considered an ecocritic. It is exactly Joyce's focus on the urban, rather than the rural, that makes his ecoconsciousness political, that is, attuned to the realpolitik of ecological relationships between the human and the non-human. This focus is not possible, as Fogarty's "Foreword" affirms, in the case of another great Irish modernist, W. B. Yeats, whose embracing of the Irish peasantry and its claimed close relationship with nature results in a romanticization of Irish nature as wild and uncontaminated (xv). This recuperative view of nature has dominated what is now considered the first wave of ecocriticism, defined by Fogarty as "an ethical movement concerned with the rescue and preservation of the natural environment" (xv-xvi). Joyce's eco-concerns go beyond this stage and engage more closely with the issues at the core of second-wave ecocriticism. This is a critique of both human exceptionalism and nature's purity, effectively explained, for example, in Donna Haraway's notion of nature-culture.¹ It is this métissage of two realities often considered as irreconcilable (nature/culture, country/city, human/non-human) that takes the center stage in Joyce's work to show that the intermeshing of nature and culture makes them codependent. In turn, this intermeshing can be recognized in Joyce's interest in the abject, urban detritus, the poverty of Dublin, and his anti-pastoral views on the modern city. In this sense, Joyce's ecocriticism is political and biopolitical and, as such, "allows us to historicise early twentieth–century writing and to reflect on the ways in which capitalist expansion, the spread of cities and the rise of new technologies have impacted on the environment" (xviii).

In their introduction, Brazeau and Gladwin stress the way the environmental themes treated by the various contributors foreground a variety of critical approaches, from cultural studies to cognitive science, in order to engage with issues of place, space, and environment in Joyce's work. The first section of this introduction presents the reader with a very useful and well-conceived history of ecocriticism, from William Rueckert's 1978 intervention to Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm's edited volume The Ecocriticism Reader.² While the first wave concentrates on nature, the aesthetic, and the literary, ecocriticism's second wave engages more with ethical and political concerns to deal, therefore, with issues of "urbanism, gender, resource management, contested landscapes in colonial zones, Darwinism, environmental justice and issues of space...