James Joyce, His Way of Interpreting the Modern World

by William York Tindall

A guide to understanding the symbolism and meaning of "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake".

134 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 1979

About the author

William York Tindall was an American Joycean scholar with a long and distinguished teaching career at Columbia University. 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.

Reviews

[Glen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though now almost 70 years old this is still a solid piece of humanities scholarship. The book moves from the particular (the "Daedalus" chapter) to the universal (the final chapter is "Myth and Symbol") and in between Tindall does his best to expound upon the major themes in Joyce's work, to show how those themes developed from Dubliners through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, reaching their artistic zenith in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Along the way the author explains how Joyce was influenced by figures from literature, myth, legend, philosophy, art, history, and religion, ranging from Homer and Ovid through Nicholas of Cusa and Vico up to Rimbaud and Freud. He avoids the obvious pitfall of attempting to substitute a reading of Joyce for reading Joyce, and provides the reader instead with a short but stimulating primer for the adventure of reading a great artist.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and enlightening analysis however it requires significant background reading to be the most beneficial.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired 1992
The Word, Montreal, Quebec