%0 Journal Article 
%A Nisbet, Rachel
%T James Joyce's urban ecoanarchism

%D 2016
%@ 2171-9594
%U http://hdl.handle.net/10017/27257
%X In this paper I contend James Joyce invests "Finnegans Wake’s" river-woman Anna Livia Plurabelle with the agency to reconnect Dublin’s inhabitants to the environs that resource their urban ecology. In early  twentieth-century Dublin, Nature retained the fearsome power of Giambattista Vico’s thunderclap. Regular typhoid  outbreaks contributed to  increased infant mortality  rates  in the inner city; and, as Anne Marie D’Arcy observes, the River Liffey delta could not absorb  the  raw  sewerage  discharged  from  the city’s wealthy coastal townships, so this washed upriver, offering the ideal conditions for typhoid’s parasitic  bacterium  to  multiply.  There  is  no  place  for  the  Romantic  sublime  in  such  a  setting.  Yet  "Finnegans Wake" nurtures the hope that Dubliners might remediate their city’s urban ecology. Anna Livia giftsthe city three key means to this end: birth control to limit population growth, an uprising of the poor to  redistribute  wealth,  and  gout  to  curb  greed  and  thus  reduce  natural  resources consumption.  While these  steps  might  initiate  the  beginning  of  an  egalitariansociety in Dublin, they require the city’s inhabitants  to  gain  a  heightened  consciousness  of  their  actions.  With  such  a  revolution,  recalling  Peter Kropotkin’s ecoanarchism, played out on an intergenerational timescale, urban Dublin could regain equilibrium  with  the  environs  that  sustain  it,  countering  the  global  phenomenon  of  the  ‘Great Acceleration’. Reading the "Wake" as ecoanarchism is one approach to discover that, like his fictional alter-ego Stephen, Joyce seeks to change the urban ecology of Dublin by pricking the conscience of generations of readers who enjoy the privileges of education, and contemplation.

%K Finnegans Wake
%K Vico
%K Ecoanarchism
%K Urban ecology
%K Post-pastoral
%K Ecoanarquismo
%K Ecología urbana
%K Literatura
%K Literature
%K Medio ambiente
%K Environmental science
%~ Biblioteca Universidad de Alcala