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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.

Language:
English Language

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

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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