Ulysses 's Ecological Epic

abstract: This article jumps into the worlds of nonhuman smallness and bigness in James Joyce's Ulysses , a novel whose scalar aesthetic comprises what I call its ecological epic. Engaging with the multidisciplinary sciences of form at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel illuminates how scalar thinking tenders different forms of multispecies relations that forge different values of ecological knowledge and judgement. Revealing the centrality of scale to ecological worldmaking and ecology's scalar instability as epistemology and method, Joyce's ecological epic engages the dialectic of scale and value that scaffolds the fictions of human scalar exceptionalism and modernity's more-than-human worlds.