James Joyce's Ulysses

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2012

⏱️ 42 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss James Joyce's novel Ulysses. First published ninety years ago in Paris, Joyce's masterpiece is a sprawling and startlingly original work charting a single day in the life of the Dubliner Leopold Bloom. Some early readers were outraged by its sexual content and daringly scatalogical humour, and the novel was banned in most English-speaking countries for a decade after it first appeared. But it was soon recognised as a genuinely innovative work: overturning the ban on its publication, an American judge described Ulysses as "a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind."Today Ulysses is widely regarded as the greatest example of literary modernism, and a work that changed literature forever. It remains one of the most discussed novels ever written.Steven ConnorProfessor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck, University of LondonJeri JohnsonSenior Fellow in English at Exeter College, OxfordRichard BrownReader in Modern English Literature at the University of LeedsProducer: Thomas Morris.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for down learning the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:10.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:12.0	Hello, in a celebrated case brought before the District Court of New York in December
0:17.0	1932, Judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce's novel Ulysses was obscene. The book had been banned shortly after its publication 10 years earlier, following outrage about its sexual content. Judge Wools' ruling is an unusual combination of legal reasoning and shrewd literary criticism.
0:36.0	Eulisie, he wrote, is not an easy book to read or to understand.
0:40.0	After describing their work as a serious experiment in a new literary genre he calls it
0:44.4	an amazing tour de force and its author a great artist in words.
0:48.8	Overturning the ban, the judge concluded that the work was not obscene, but a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind. Ulysses describes a single day in the lives of the Dubliners Leopold Blume and Stephen Dedelles.
1:05.8	It's packed with classical illusions, often difficult and experimental writing, but it's also
1:10.3	funny and earthy, musical and rude.
1:13.5	And it's generally regarded as a, if not
1:15.3	the towering masterpiece of modern fiction.
1:18.2	With me to discuss James Joes Juleses
1:20.6	are Stephen Connor, Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck University of London,
1:26.2	Jerry Johnson, Senior Fellow in English at Exeter College, Oxford, and Richard Brown,
1:30.5	reader in Modern English Literature at the University of Leeds.
1:33.8	Steve Connor, James Joss was born in 1882 and grew up in Dublin.
1:37.4	Would you tell us something about his early life?
1:39.6	Well, he was a one from a member of a very large family what became in the end ten children
1:46.2	son of a larger-than-life character kind of improvident father so nevertheless he was able to have really very kind of intensely academic
1:56.7	education which stood in very good stead during a period in which Ireland was
2:02.0	experiencing a huge kind of upsurge of cultural self-confidence,
	...

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