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History Trivia: Ulysses Book Court Ruling 9 Views
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Description:
Careful, kids-- we're about to get into some grade A literary scandalousness.
Transcript
- 00:00
Thank you We sneak in Freedom of speech is a
- 00:05
fundamental part of being an american it's the first amendment
- 00:10
We love freedom of speech And yet even to this
- 00:13
day some books are banned One in particular i'd like
- 00:17
to talk about is ulysses by james joyce So james
Full Transcript
- 00:21
joyce started writing the book in nineteen Fourteen and at
- 00:23
the time censorship laws were ridiculous And of course this
- 00:27
was before television but in printed word swear words any
- 00:32
kind of sexuality it was like nothing was okay Nothing
- 00:36
was okay This is like the town from footloose packed
- 00:40
into a chastity belt And then like constantly being threatened
- 00:44
like i'm gonna wash your mouth out with soap that
- 00:47
was publishers in nineteen fourteen The book was massive It
- 00:50
ended up being eight hundred pages So even by today's
- 00:53
standards is a live a huge book So it was
- 00:57
hugely expensive to publish an entire book especially one that's
- 01:01
hundred pages So instead of publishing the entire book joyce
- 01:05
started publishing little snippets of it And readers were like
- 01:11
hail readers were like what is this smut And they
- 01:16
actually filed a lawsuit And who in particular it is
- 01:19
but certain readers filed a lawsuit against the publishers for
- 01:23
printing ulysses They rocks you like mussels Horrible The publishers
- 01:28
were cool with it Readers were the ones who were
- 01:31
outraged that it was lewd and they demanded that Just
- 01:36
get rid of it Stop publishing this They filed a
- 01:38
lawsuit It was just super dramatic In nineteen twenty joyce
- 01:44
moved to france He was like americans Dollar proves and
- 01:48
sylvia beach who is the owner of the shakes Shakespeare
- 01:52
and company bookstore decided to help print and distribute the
- 01:56
full eight hundred pages of the book which was awesome
- 01:59
around france So in nineteen twenty two is when additions
- 02:03
started to be to come out and be published and
- 02:05
circulated but it was still illegal in britain and in
- 02:08
the u s a little hard to smuggle an eight
- 02:11
hundred page book It's pretty thick fur Yeah anything Yeah
- 02:17
but of course anything that is kind of scandalous is
- 02:20
going to be popular Obviously so bootleggers started printing the
- 02:25
book and circulating it illegally which is awful because then
- 02:29
joyce made no money from it And i mean at
- 02:32
the time it's it's Not like he was making money
- 02:34
From like going on worldwide book signing tours with his
- 02:38
lewd material or you know being a speaking universities or
- 02:42
anything So that sucks If you're all familiar with joyce
- 02:46
everyone knows that his stuff is very long It is
- 02:50
very complex reading So you probably like what's the big
- 02:53
deal Like why was it banned Well by today's standards
- 02:56
it's not a big deal you know you turn on
- 02:58
the tv Daytime tv has way worse stuff But the
- 03:01
reason his book was so famous was because he focused
- 03:03
on the gritty dirty details of just normal natural day
- 03:09
to day life So eating drinking bowel movements you know
- 03:12
much more personal activities if you know what i mean
- 03:15
The list goes on He just covers all of it
- 03:18
And it's kind of gross i'm sure But humans air
- 03:22
brose I'm growth You're grows well goes what we do
- 03:28
The natural mind However that was a radical approach to
- 03:32
storytelling at the time Honesty What are we thinking Oh
- 03:36
flute And this is what the book's american publisher purposefully
- 03:42
very intentionally got a book out there on had it
- 03:46
confiscated And that way they got to go to trial
- 03:50
So they were like lips get our day in court
- 03:52
I want my se on this in nineteen thirty four
- 03:56
they went to trial and judge john woolsey named it
- 04:00
permissible He's like this book is fine He said that
- 04:04
it was fine because the like obscene bits were not
- 04:08
lust inducing so certain aspects of sexuality He i'm assuming
- 04:14
he probably would have been cool with but he just
- 04:16
said that the obscene bits in the book worm or
- 04:20
vomit inducing than anything Yet it's funny because he still
- 04:23
praised james joyce is writing style is writing in his
- 04:27
writing style and he said it's it's a very honest
- 04:30
and accurate depiction of just human thoughts and feelings and
- 04:35
activities So yeah g o him he was a rules
- 04:41
e was a progressive For the time he was a
- 04:43
lamb Well lam james joyce had a little lamb I'm 00:04:50.07 --> [endTime] done
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