James Joyces "Ulysses" was first published 100 years ago and has a profound impact on the literature and culture of the century to follow.
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:04 History is a nightmare from which I'm trying to awake.
00:08 100 years ago, when James Joyce published Ulysses
00:15 on February 2, 1922 in a small bookshop in Paris,
00:19 he fundamentally altered the course of modern literature,
00:22 art, and culture.
00:26 With his book, Ireland is making a sensational re-entrance
00:30 into high literature.
00:33 Everybody knows that Ulysses is the greatest
00:36 novel of the century.
00:38 Joyce was a revolutionary.
00:40 He revolutionized literary expression in a way
00:43 that nobody else has.
00:46 Celebrated throughout the world as a masterpiece of modernism,
00:49 Ulysses was banned in America and Britain,
00:51 where it shocked and stunned in equal measure.
00:55 We had this idea that if he could capture
00:58 the lives of ordinary Dublin people on one day,
01:03 that people anywhere in the world at any time
01:05 would be able to read something of themselves in that.
01:10 When you step into Ulysses, you enter
01:12 a universe of his creation.
01:14 And it is an entire universe.
01:16 Joyce's unparalleled genius would inspire creators
01:20 as diverse as Eileen Gray, Sergei Eisenstein, Man Ray,
01:24 and Bob Dylan.
01:26 Extremism, xenophobia, chauvinism,
01:30 the oppression of other nations and races
01:33 was profoundly objectionable to Joyce.
01:38 Joyce saw very early the dangers of discrimination
01:41 and the dangers of extreme nationalism.
01:45 Ulysses, which remains as fresh today as it was a century ago,
01:49 has revealed itself as a prophetic text that
01:52 imagines a better future not only for Ireland,
01:55 but for Europe and the world.
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