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The Art of a Day

James Joyce's epic Ulysses is set within a single day. One hundred years after its publication, writer James Marriott explores the long shadow of the one-day artwork.

Why tell a story set in just one day? Writer James Marriott explores the single day - or circadian - artwork, pioneered by James Joyce鈥檚 epic Ulysses, published in February 1922, and generally considered a landmark moment in the emergence of the modernist movement before it swept through European culture.

What made Joyce choose to set his 鈥渙dyssey鈥 within these confines? And what has been the cultural impact and long afterlife of the one-day artwork, from Virginia Woolf鈥檚 Mrs Dalloway to Groundhog Day? We speak to Ulysses experts, novelists including AL Kennedy and Ian McEwan who continue to draw inspiration from it and make the one-day form their own, critic Rhianna Dhillon, and literature-loving physicist Carlo Rovelli who unravels the many timescales at play in these artworks, and perhaps even the nature of time itself.

Presenter: James Marriott
Producer: Beth Sagar-Fenton

Available now

44 minutes

Broadcasts

  • Sun 30 Jan 2022 18:45
  • Wed 6 Sep 2023 22:00

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