Queer animals and agriculture in James Joyce's A portrait of the artist as a young man

Abstract

This thesis will read James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a text that is fundamentally concerned with ecological issues, demonstrating awareness of the land beyond and outside of Dublin. Joyce frequently depicts the colonization of Ireland as centered on the control of land in the form of agriculture, which he brings into the political foreground of the novel's characters. I will argue further that this novel is critical of the violent nationalist rhetoric and insurrections of early 1900s Ireland, a movement which perpetuated the agricultural control of land. As an effective rebellion to this aporia, which Joseph Valente has termed “the metrocolonial double bind,” I will read the novel’s queer ecology, a non-violent resistance that moves beyond constricting categories of human/animal, urban/rural, and opens up the world for novel ways of living and being.