"Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have become the Bible of modern literature."So why should non-believers care? Lodge maintains that "no other book of the 20th century has got so close to rendering in words what cognitive scientists call qualia - the minutiae of feelings, sensations and emotions". To later writers, he argues, Ulysses bequeathed its "superb stream-of- consciousness method" and its use of myth as "an underlying narrative structure for what seems like a rather shapeless slice of modern life". That's why it attracts rather obsessive, tunnel- visioned scholars. It's rather like a gigantic crossword puzzle in three dimensions." The critic Valentine Cunningham says that non-religious critics can "find a post-theological satisfaction" wrangling over commas and full stops. Typeset by a printer in Dijon, it had more than 2,000 misprints. Joyce constantly meddled with his various manuscripts as he wrote the book in Zurich and Trieste from 1916 onwards Even publication failed to stop his tinkering. The result has proved to be a minefield - and also a goldmine - for academic duellists ever since.Novelist and academic David Lodge comments that "Joyce said he had written a book that would keep the professors busy for 100 years There's a pedantry of genius in Ulysses.

Enthusiasts will trace Leopold and Stephen's route across Dublin, while a mass in Sydney will mark the passing of the fictional Paddy Dignam, whose funeral Bloom attends. Disputes over the book's text have dogged it from the moment that Joyce's American patron Sylvia Beach issued the first edition of 1,000 copies in Paris in 1922. The virtuoso comic epic maps 24 hours in the life of two Dubliners, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, on to the episodic plan of Homer's Odyssey. Ulysses is set on 16 June 1904, when Joyce first dated his future wife, Nora Barnacle. Already the scholarly insults are flying "like a shot off a shovel" (as Ulysses puts it). In the London Review of Books, Lawrence Rainey - a Joyce specialist from Yale University - accuses Picador's editor Danis Rose of demagoguery and despotism, and damns the project as a "self-aggrandising fantasy". Next week, to coincide with "Bloomsday" in the 75th anniversary year of the novel's publication, Picador will publish a new and controversial "reader's edition" of Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses.

Nearly three centuries later, James Joyce - another great Dublin writer - still cooks up quarrels over minute details that look just as crazy to outsiders. In the early 18th century, Jonathan Swift invented the Little Endians and Big Endians, who went to war over the best way to crack open a boiled egg. Sometimes they are scattered like confetti with no regard to their relevance, sometimes they are left out incorrectly. "It's" instead of "its", meaning belonging to it, is a classic example of the misdeeds.Phrases are not immune from the assaults of the obscurantists. "As far as (someone/something) is/are concerned" is being sneakily deprived of its "is/are concerned" element A "neither .. or" has been perpetrated on the radio and in the press. And hope has presumably gone for "different from" after its pummelling into "different to", or, worse, "different than".The extent of the mischief is evident even in slang.