Joyce’s Blinders: An Urban Ecocritical Study of Dubliners and More

Abstract

In this chapter, Joseph Kelly discusses how the boys’ trip around Dublin city in "An Encounter" takes them into four distinct parts of the city, what urban ecologists call “natural areas” or geographic sections that divide a city into what Robert Park calls a “mosaic of little worlds that touch but do not penetrate” (Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 40–43). Focused in part on the methodologies of the Chicago School and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and their approaches to studying modern cities, Kelly invites us to see Dublin through the lens of what he calls “urban ecocriticism,” and he notes that Joyce was a keen observer and analyzer of urban life and the oppressive forces it breeds; but he also acknowledges that the methods used to analyze urban life often distort and obscure the largest segment of the twentieth-century city—the city’s poor—and studying these methods as they are pronounced in Dubliners and Ulysses reveals Dublin’s distinct exploitation of her poor.