A Cultural Ecological Approach to Sustainable Textuality in James Joyce’s Dubliners

This paper examines ecology and communication aesthetics in James Joyce’s “Dubliners” to explore their function in his representation of long-term self-reflexive eco/bio semiotic complexity models and Dubliners’ quest for sustainability. So, this paper argues that “Dubliners” is a sustainable cultural form of the aesthetics of ecology and communication in light of Hubert Zapf’s conceptual framework of the culture ecology paradigm that focuses on the interrelationships between nature and culture as a resource of literary creativity and production. To do so, this paper focuses on Zapf’s ideas of communication and ecology as features of culturally sustainable practices and his tools for discovering these practices, such as the triadic functional model of literature as a force of culture ecology and the transdisciplinary contexts of a literary ecology, such as the biophilic atmosphere. The importance of examining this aesthetic of communication and ecology lies in exploring their contribution to sustainable textuality as an aspect of cultural sustainability, in highlighting the functional approach to “Dubliners” as a challenge to ideas such as ‘Art for Art Sake’, and in reading the short story genre as a mode of sustainability and “Dubliners” as a model of the relationship between literature and sustainability.