“Wait. Trees Are They? An Optical Illusion.” An Ecocritical Reading of Plant Life in Ulysses

An ecocritical approach to Joyce’s texts may seem challenging, if not risky, given that Joyce is such an urban writer, as even eco-readers are inclined to admit. Yet, the present essay takes on this challenge and, partly inspired by the tenets of ecocriticism, aims to examine the correlation and co-penetration between the human and the environmental non-human in Joyce’s Ulysses, by focussing on the textual presence, symbolic meaning and cultural/political function of plants and flora in James Joyce’s masterpiece.