Ireland and Ecocriticism
Second Interdisciplinary Conference
19-21 June 2014
Keynote Speakers
Christine Cusick, editor of Out of the Earth: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts
Oona Frawley, author of Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth-Century Irish Literature
Featured Poet
Sinéad Morrissey, Belfast Poet Laureate
Der Angstlustbaum, Stephen Brandes, 2005, Crawford Gallery, Cork
Ireland and Ecocriticism: Second Interdisciplinary Conference
19-21 June 2014, University College Cork
Call for Papers
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.
With this wide sweep of interests in play, the conference hopes to attract contributions from a variety of disciplines,
not just across the arts, but, ideally, breaching the divide between the arts and sciences, as ecocriticism is uniquely
positioned to do. Proposals for both English- and Irish-language contributions, papers and panels, are welcome from
all interested scholars.
Suggested topics might include, but are not limited to:
Wigs on the green: Queer Irish ecologies
Black comedy and dark ecology
Contemporary soundscapes
‘Sermons’ in stones’ in post-religious society
Horsemeat dressed as beef: Food panics and animal rights
The centenary decade: “Placing” commemoration
“Tidy Towns”, tourism, and the aesthetics of trash
The diaspora’s preservation of the “Auld Sod”
Mother Ireland / Mother Nature
The Hill of Tara and Terminal Two: The new nostalgia
‘Hauntology’: Possession, dispossession, and ghost estates
Irish water (and power) from the Shannon Scheme to cryptosporidium
Sustainable farming: Saving the floury spud
The history of Irish hunger, the future of the Irish body
Colonialism and the countryside: From plantation to fracking
High viz jackets and the endangered crane: Irish labour and the environment
Proposals of no more than 500 words to Maureen O’Connor, maureen.oconnor@ucc.ie, by 31 January 2014.
For more information: irelandecocriticism.wordpress.com
Follow the conference on Twitter @IrishEcocritic and Facebook: www.facebook.com/irelandecocriticism