Laudator Temporis Acti

Craig Simpson, "James Joyce's Ulysses issued with trigger warning after it is deemed 'offensive' to modern students," Telegraph (February 2, 2023):

Outraged censors banned Ulysses in 1922, and a century later academics fear the novel may be too shocking for modern students, as James Joyce's work has been issued with a trigger warning for being potentially "offensive". The 800-page story of an ordinary man’s day in Dublin is taught on a dedicated module at the University of Glasgow, where staff now alert students to possibly upsetting "language and attitudes" in the writer's work.

Joyce's writing contains "explicit" references "to sexual matters", according to a trigger warning seen by the Telegraph states, highlighting the same issue which led Britain to ban his work 100 years ago.

[....]

Prof Frank Furedi, an education expert at the University of Kent, said: "The trigger warning brigade demonstrates that the impulse to censor is alive and well. The spirit of the old-school censors who banned Ulysses in 1922 lives on.

"It was only a matter of time before the grievance archeologists dug up something to feel traumatised about in Joyce's great work.

"The trigger hunters could not possibly give the author of Ulysses a free pass. For the record, if you find Joyce triggering you better confine your reading to the London phone directory."

Hat tip: A friend whose father, aunts, grandparents, and great-grandparents were graduates of the University of Glasgow, and who remarks:

Shame on them all. Just what sort of mollycoddled craters do they envisage might benefit from such warnings...? I really do despair. We're surrounded by rank crass cretins. Who in their right minds in the universities isn't fed up to their eye-teeth with academic self-flagellating cant about race and gender? The said University spokesman needs a trigger warning of his own, or perhaps just both barrels will do without warning. Deal with the herald first and the rest later. And as for the students, if they are offended by Ulysses or anything else in English Literature, they should really switch to Business Studies or just bugger off and work as shop assistants and social workers.

A gloss on my friend's remarks: crater = Scots for critter, creature.

I've never read Joyce's Ulysses, but perhaps now I will, in keeping with my policy of reading as many books on the modern Index Librorum Prohibitorum as I can.