Abstract
ber 6, 1933, the Honourable John M. Woolsey lifted the ban on Joyce's novel. His opinion suggests, with nicely judged irony, that whereas nausea may, at pinch, be permissibly induced in the American reader, sexual stimulation may not. Or more figuratively, not to say more graphically put: throwing up is legitimate reader response, getting it up is taboo. The quotation with which I have chosen to preface this essay is sufficient indication, I believe, that Judge Woolsey was a master of juridical prose.2 (He has indeed been compared with Oliver Wendell Holmes in this respect.) That he was in addition no mean judge of literature may be inferred from the following citations, which I introduce as much for the pleasure I take in the felicity of their diction, as for the literary acumen they attest to. It is Judge Woolsey's view that Joyce, in writing Ulysses, sought to make serious experiment in new, if not wholly novel literary genre, attempting with what Woolsey calls astonishing success
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