Ireland and Ecocriticism: Second Interdisciplinary Conference, 19-21 June 2014

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from around the world interested in Irish space and place as metaphor, livelihood, memory, or tradition, and who are engaging with environmental concerns in Ireland, including those affecting individual and communal health.

Nearly a century ago, James Joyce averred that “Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her. Which is a false attitude, an egotism, absurd like all egotisms.” The second interdisciplinary conference on the topic of Ireland and Ecocriticism hopes to acknowledge the dangerous truth of Joyce’s observation by turning to account his country’s anomalous relationship to modernity. Ireland’s experience of literary Romanticism, usually associated with nature poetry, will not map onto existing Anglophone and continental accounts of the phenomenon, and neither will Romantic oppositions between city and country, culture and wilderness. Oscar Wilde noted that the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth “found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there.” Later W.B. Yeats would say of Wordsworth, ‘most English of poets, he finds his image in every lake and puddle. He has to burden the skylark with his cares before he can celebrate it.” Ecocriticism is now in its “third wave,” a deconstructionist re-evaluation of the possibility of something understood as nature, the ways in which what we call “nature” is culturally, discursively constructed, and yet implicated in the very act of this construction. Relatively unburdened by the traditional Romantic legacy, Irish Studies is potentially poised to make significant contributions to this latest attempt to come to terms with the current environmental crisis from which egotism cannot protect us. It has been acknowledged, by David Harvey among others, that “ecology must engage with urbanization to have relevance in the twenty-first century.” For centuries, Ireland has experienced waves of settlement and “urbanization” from without, and recent decades have seen that pattern exponentially expanded by internal forces, particularly during the economic boom and inevitable bust. Even without consciously identifying their work as such, Irish artists, writers, and scientists have been of necessity engaging in eco-critique of the radical changes being wrought upon the Irish landscape, however that is understood: as metaphor, livelihood, memory, tradition, or environmental concerns, including those affecting individual and communal health.

Waged Delegate: €100
Unwaged delegate/student: €70

Contact: Maureen O'Connor, tel: +353 87 6106579 email: