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Modernism is a reactionary culture, a fact that I demonstrated by pointing in detail to the works of a dozen leading Modernist figures including T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Pablo Picasso, and others. In all of these writers and artists, there was a similar rejection of all that is truly modern: a democratic capitalist society in which ordinary citizens seek freedom and opportunity for themselves and their families, including economic, religious, and political liberty.

In 1923, the year after James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was first published in its complete form, T. S. Eliot wrote: “I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.” Although Ulysses was not yet widely available at the time—its initial print runs were minuscule and it would be banned repeatedly by censorship boards—Eliot was writing in defense of a novel already broadly disparaged as immoral, obscene, formless, and chaotic. His friend Virginia Woolf had described...

One judge grumbled, “it sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind – I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.” --- British authorities weren’t far behind. Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in Paris in 1922, and when a copy seized at a London airport made its way to the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, he declared Molly Bloom’s soliloquy – the only episode he bothered to read – a production of “unmitigated filth and obscenity”. Hundreds of copies of Ulysses were seized and burned as they landed in the UK and the US.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in 1922, just over two weeks after the British handed over the keys of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins and his new Irish government. The other great literary event of that year was TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. Joyce’s novel had much in common with Eliot’s long poem — it dealt with the rawness of urban life using competing narrative forms, including pastiche and myth and different kinds of voices. The Waste Land sounded a sort of death knell for the narrative poem, just as Ulysses set about killing off the single-perspective, the all-knowing...

This year marks 80 years since the death of the great Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941). His most famous novel, Ulysses (1922), is one of those books, like Moby Dick or Infinite Jest, that more people begin than finish. The tome is widely believed to be a stream of consciousness novel and you could certainly be forgiven for thinking that if, like many, you only made it 100 pages or so in. I often advise against starting at the beginning of the novel. In the case of Ulysses, you are thrown headfirst into the difficult stream of consciousness of Stephen...

The Roaring Twenties was the most fun, dynamic, and frivolous decade in American history. Let's make a new one. “I was born in the wrong era.” It is a common refrain. It is very natural for us as human beings to peer back through the annals of history and find a time that seems better suited to us. For many people, myself included, one of those times is the mythical roaring 1920s. The dapper dress, the hot jazz, the peephole of a speakeasy sliding open as you pronounce the password.Oh, to have lived in the ’20s. But wait. In just...

“It is,” the editor of the London Sunday Express had written nine years earlier, sounding like H.P. Lovecraft describing Necronomicon: the most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature….All the secret sewers of vice are canalized in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and pornographic words. And its unclean lunacies are larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies directed against the Christian religion and against the name of Christ—blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.

I'm well into my 70s and checking off an item on my bucket list is finally getting around to reading Ulysses by James Joyce. It was never assigned reading in high school or college (I went to a Christian school, which may be one of the reasons). So, at my advanced age, I'm attempting at long last to tackle this work.I have a long attention span and am not easily bored nor discouraged. I've read long, involved books and have found most of them gripping, such as The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Faust by Goethe and Crime and Punishment...

Have you ever lied about reading a book? Maybe you didn’t want to seem stupid in front of someone you respected. Maybe you rationalized it by reasoning that you had a familiarity with the book, or knew who the author was, or what the story was about, or had glanced at its Wikipedia page. Or maybe you had tried to read the book, even bought it and set it by your bed for months unopened, hoping that it would impart what was in it merely via proximity (if that worked, please email me).

AT NINE o'clock on the morning of September 11th 2001, President George Bush sat in an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, listening to seven-year-olds read stories about goats. “Night fell on a different world,” he said of that day. And on a different America. At first, America and the world seemed to change together. “We are all New Yorkers now,” ran an e-mail from Berlin that day, mirroring John F. Kennedy's declaration 40 years earlier, “Ich bin ein Berliner”, and predicting Le Monde's headline the next day, “Nous sommes tous Américains”. And America, for its part, seemed to become more...