There may be innu­mer­able moral and philo­soph­i­cal rea­sons why we should read cer­tain books, hear cer­tain sym­phonies, see cer­tain paint­ings…. Those rea­sons are most­ly intan­gi­ble, which makes them nobler, I sup­pose, than the rea­sons we should buy a lux­u­ry car or vaca­tion home. Nev­er­the­less, the sales­man­ship of high cul­ture can some­times feel of a piece, mak­ing sub­tle, or not so sub­tle, appeals to safe­ty, sta­tus, and invest­ment val­ue. What of pure enjoy­ment? The immer­sion in a work of art because it sim­ply feels good? To allow for plea­sure alone to guide our aes­thet­ic tastes, some might feel, would be amoral; would cheap­en cul­ture and ele­vate some sup­pos­ed­ly vul­gar prod­ucts to the sta­tus of high art. Can’t have that.

Of course, how much high art was once con­sid­ered a haz­ard to good taste and pub­lic moral­i­ty? Mod­ernism puffs out its chest with pride for hav­ing fos­tered many cre­ative works that shocked and tit­il­lat­ed their first mass audi­ences. James Joyce’s Ulysses ranks quite high­ly upon that list. The novel’s ini­tial rep­u­ta­tion as high­brow smut seems at odds with Sam Slote’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of it in the TED-Ed video above as “both a lit­er­ary mas­ter­piece and one of the hard­est works of lit­er­a­ture to read.” But it can be all those things and more. Inside the dense exper­i­men­tal epic is a charm­ing­ly detailed trav­el­ogue of Dublin, a the­o­log­i­cal trea­tise on heresy, a series of Freudi­an jokes with the kinds of sopho­moric punch­lines “state­ly, plump Buck Mul­li­gan” would appre­ci­ate….

Not for noth­ing has Joyce inspired a cult fol­low­ing, if not some­thing of a down­right cult, whose mem­bers gath­er all over the world on June 16th for “Blooms­day”—the sin­gle day on which the nov­el takes place, and on which Joyce met his life­long part­ner Nora Bar­na­cle in 1904. Dressed in peri­od cos­tume, Joyce fans read the nov­el aloud, and hun­dreds make the pil­grim­age to Dublin to fol­low the per­am­bu­la­tions of pro­tag­o­nists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. “What is it,” asks Slote, an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor at Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin’s School of Eng­lish, “about this famous­ly dif­fi­cult nov­el that inspires so many peo­ple?” Pro­fes­sor Slote is no dilet­tante but an expert who has pub­lished six books on Joyce and an anno­tat­ed edi­tion of Ulysses. He admits “there’s no one sim­ple answer to that ques­tion.”

Nev­er­the­less, the answers Slote does pro­vide in the six-minute ani­mat­ed intro to Ulysses relate not to the novel’s moral, social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or polit­i­cal virtues, but to those qual­i­ties that give read­ers enjoy­ment. Each chap­ter is writ­ten in a dif­fer­ent style,” a play, a “cheesy romance nov­el,” an imi­ta­tion of music. Ulysses is a mod­ern par­o­dy of Homer’s Odyssey and a vir­tu­oso med­ley of tech­ni­cal per­for­mances, includ­ing a chap­ter which “repro­duces the evo­lu­tion of Eng­lish lit­er­ary prose style, from its begin­nings in Anglo Sax­on right up to the 20th cen­tu­ry.” The final chap­ter, Mol­ly Bloom’s stream-of-con­scious­ness solil­o­quy, is a tour-de-force, cap­ping off the “nar­ra­tive gym­nas­tic rou­tines.” The shift­ing styles are aug­ment­ed by “some of the most imag­i­na­tive uses of lan­guage you’ll find any­where.”

As for the novel’s fre­quent pas­sages of “impen­e­tra­ble” den­si­ty? Well, Slote admits that “it’s up to the read­er to let their eyes skim over them or grab a shov­el and dig in.” In the remain­ing few min­utes, he may have you con­vinced that the plea­sure is worth the effort.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

James Joyce: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Life and Lit­er­ary Works

The First Blooms­day: See Dublin’s Literati Cel­e­brate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunk­en Fash­ion (1954)

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Pod­cast

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Vir­ginia Woolf dis­suad­ed read­ers from play­ing the crit­ic in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” But in addi­tion to her nov­els, she is best known for her lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and became a foun­da­tion­al fig­ure in fem­i­nist lit­er­ary the­o­ry for her imag­i­na­tive polemic “A Room of One’s Own,” an essay that takes tra­di­tion­al crit­i­cism to task for its pre­sump­tions of male lit­er­ary supe­ri­or­i­ty.

Women writ­ers like her­self, she argues, had always been a priv­i­leged few with the means and the free­dom to pur­sue writ­ing in ways most women couldn’t. These con­di­tions were so rare for women through­out lit­er­ary his­to­ry that innu­mer­able artists may have gone unno­ticed and unher­ald­ed for their lack of oppor­tu­ni­ty. Her obser­va­tion would have put her read­ers in mind of Thomas Gray’s revered “Ele­gy Writ­ten in a Coun­try Church­yard,” with its famous line about a pau­per’s grave: “Some mute inglo­ri­ous Mil­ton here may rest.”

Woolf alludes to the poem, writ­ing of “some mute and inglo­ri­ous Jane Austen,” and makes a case that would-have-been women writ­ers were excep­tion­al­ly mar­gin­al­ized by gender—by its inter­sec­tions with pow­er and priv­i­lege and their lack. She famous­ly con­struct­ed a scenario—brought into pop cul­ture by The Smiths and Bana­nara­ma singer Siob­han Fahey—involv­ing Shakespeare’s fic­tion­al sis­ter Judith, whose tal­ent and ambi­tion are squashed for the sake of her brother’s edu­ca­tion. It is hard­ly a far-fetched idea. We might remem­ber Mozart’s sis­ter Nan­nerl, who was also a child prodi­gy, whose career end­ed with her child­hood, and who dis­ap­peared in her brother’s shad­ow.

In the TED-Ed video at the top, Woolf schol­ar and doc­tor­al can­di­date at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Iseult Gille­spie describes the import of Woolf’s thought exper­i­ment. Shakespeare’s sis­ter stands in for every woman who is pushed into domes­tic labor and mar­riage while the men in her fam­i­ly pur­sue their goals unhin­dered. “Woolf demon­strates the tragedy of genius restrict­ed,” just as Langston Hugh­es would do a cou­ple decades lat­er. Her par­tic­u­lar genius, says Gille­spie, lies in her abil­i­ty to por­tray “the inter­nal expe­ri­ence of alien­ation…. Her char­ac­ters fre­quent­ly live inner lives that are deeply at odds with their exter­nal exis­tence.”

The video out­lines Woolf’s own biog­ra­phy: her inclu­sion in the “Blooms­bury Group”—a social cir­cle includ­ing E.M. Forster and Vir­gini­a’s soon-to-be hus­band Leonard Woolf. And it sketch­es out the inno­v­a­tive  lit­er­ary tech­niques of her nov­els. Woolf thought of her­self, as Alain de Bot­ton says in his short intro­duc­tion above, as a “dis­tinc­tive­ly mod­ernist writer at odds with a raft of the staid and com­pla­cent assump­tions of 19th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture.” One such assump­tion, as she writes in “A Room of One’s Own,” includes an opin­ion that “the best woman was intel­lec­tu­al­ly the infe­ri­or of the worst man.”

Woolf’s own mod­ernist break­throughs rival those of her con­tem­po­raries James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Her favorite women writ­ers rank as high­ly as men in the same canon in any seri­ous study; but this is of course beside the point. It wasn’t the truth or false­hood of claims about women’s infe­ri­or­i­ty that deter­mined their pow­er, but rather the social pow­er of those who made such claims.

Dom­i­neer­ing fathers, spot­light-steal­ing broth­ers, mor­al­iz­ing cler­gy­men, the gate­keep­ing intel­lec­tu­als of “Oxbridge”—Woolf’s port­man­teau for the snob­bery and chau­vin­ism of Oxford and Cam­bridge dons: it was such men who deter­mined not only whether or not a woman might pur­sue her writ­ing, but whether she lived or died in penury, mute and inglo­ri­ous. Woolf knew much of what she wrote, hav­ing grown up sur­round­ed by the cream of 19th-cen­tu­ry lit­er­ary soci­ety, and hav­ing had to “steal an edu­ca­tion from her father’s study,” as de Bot­ton notes, while her broth­ers went off to Cam­bridge. She was nonethe­less well aware of her priv­i­lege and used it not only to cre­ate new forms of writ­ing, but to open new lit­er­ary spaces for women writ­ers to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Vir­ginia Woolf

The Steamy Love Let­ters of Vir­ginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (1925–1929)

Watch Pat­ti Smith Read from Vir­ginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Sur­viv­ing Record­ing of Woolf’s Voice

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness