James Joyce's Ulysses

In Our Time: Culture

BBC

History

4.6 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2012

⏱️ 43 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.

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0:45.5	Hello in a celebrated case brought before the district court of New York in December
0:50.8	1932
0:51.3	Judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce December 1932, Judge
0:53.4	Judge John Woolsey was asked to decide whether James Joyce's novel Ulysses
0:56.1	was obscene.
0:57.6	The book had been banned shortly after its publication 10 years earlier,
1:00.9	following outrage about its sexual content.
1:04.0	Judge Wools' ruling is an unusual combination of legal reasoning and shrewd literary criticism.
1:09.4	Eulices, he wrote, he's not an easy book to read or to understand. After describing their work as a serious experiment
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