What is it about?
This article examines (1) how walking functions as a site charged with contested memories and histories in the “Proteus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and (2) how the coastal landscape offers the walker both infinite possibilities and pitfalls.
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Why is it important?
It explores James Joyce’s environmental engagement and his treatment of nature walking, contributing to an ecological reading of his work. This perspective is important because it anticipates more nuanced interpretations of walking and embodied perception in Joyce, while also challenging the dominant view of him as primarily a writer of the modern city rather than a writer attentive to the natural world.
Perspectives
I hope this article speaks to for both Joyce scholars and scholars of ecocriticism. By bringing modernist scholarship into closer dialogue with ecocritical debates, I aim to highlight how modernist texts register environmental awareness in ways that can enrich our understanding of the Anthropocene and the entanglements of modernity with the natural world. I also hope this essay encourages further discussion of practices such as nature walking in modernist writing.
Seungho Lee
Georgia Institute of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: “Walking into Eternity”: Peripatetic, Seascape, and Nebeneinander in “Proteus”, August 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004727649_005.
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