William York Tindall
William York Tindall | |
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Born | 1903 Williamstown, Vermont, U.S. |
Died | 1981 (aged 77–78) Salisbury, Maryland, U.S. |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Columbia College |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Columbia University |
William York Tindall (1903–1981) was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University.[1] Several of Tindall's classic works of criticism, including A Reader's Guide to James Joyce and A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake are still in print. He wrote a total of thirteen books on UK and Irish writers including Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Samuel Beckett. Indeed, Tindall nominated Beckett for the Nobel Prize in Literature; Beckett was the 1969 laureate.[1]
Born in Vermont, he studied at Columbia, both as an undergraduate and graduate student. Between those courses of study, in 1925 he set off to see Europe. He went to Paris and bought a copy of Joyce's Ulysses — then banned in America. By chance, he bought it on June 16, Bloomsday, the day in which all the events in the book take place. He had it rebound as a French novel to carry it through US Customs. That began Professor Tindall's study of and advocacy for Joyce's works in America; in fact, he started teaching Ulysses before the book was allowed in the US. Therefore, students in his first Ulysses course were forced to read the dean's copy kept secured in the university library. Finally in 1933, the United States District Court in New York City ruled that the novel was not obscene and could be published in America and in January 1934 Ulysses was available legally in the US.
Professor Tindall's teaching career at Columbia lasted from 1931 to 1971. For four decades, he taught some of the most popular literary criticism courses in the curriculum. He pioneered a method of reading Joyce's most difficult novel Finnegans Wake with a small group of graduate students, everyone adding a bit of their academic knowledge to the task. He called this Reading by Committee, saying that the group brought to it "a variety of languages and learning, [and] might do more with the book than I alone, with small learning and less Greek."[1]
References
- ^ a b c Mitgang, Herbert (9 September 1981). "William York Tindall, James Joyce Scholar". The New York Times. Retrieved 2 April 2014.
External links
- Finding aid to William York Tindall papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
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Posthumous publications |
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- Ulysses in Nighttown (1958 play)
- Ulysses (1967 film)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977 film)
- Ulysses (1982 broadcast)
- The Dead (1987 film)
- James Joyce's The Dead (1999 musical)
- Bloom (2003 film)
- Waywords and Meansigns (2015–2017 audio)
- Harriet Shaw Weaver
- Obscenity trial of Ulysses in The Little Review
- United States v. One Book Called Ulysses
- Bellsybabble
- Bloomsday
- James Joyce Award
- James Joyce Centre
- James Joyce Tower and Museum
- Museum of Literature Ireland
- Quark
- Volta Cinematograph
- Zürich James Joyce Foundation
- Anthony Burgess
- Frank Delaney
- Richard Ellmann
- Alan Warren Friedman
- Francisco García Tortosa
- Stuart Gilbert
- Adaline Glasheen
- Michael Groden
- Hugh Kenner
- Ira Nadel
- David Norris
- William H. Quillian
- C. George Sandulescu
- Fritz Senn
- John Simpson
- Ronald Symond
- William York Tindall
- José María Valverde
- Ernst von Glasersfeld
works about
- Nora Barnacle (wife)
- Lucia Joyce (daughter)
- John Stanislaus Joyce (father)
- Stanislaus Joyce (brother)
- Stephen James Joyce (grandson)
- Mary Gertrude Joyce (sister)