My research cited by other texts: Parsons

Here is another text that cites my John Kennedy Toole research.

Parsons and Magnani (2014). "Late Medieval: Chaucer." The Year's Work in English Studies. v. 93 (1): 257-276. This article cites on page 274 my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" article.

Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, the Occasional Series, Part 24: Franny and Zooey

Thesis #24: Franny and Zooey and Confederacy

One of the books that Toole possessed was J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey. Several studies have explored the thematic connections between A Confederacy of Dunces and Catcher in the Rye. The evidence is solid that Toole held Catcher in the highest esteem (see the discussion of this in my paper Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer, page 20 in version 2.0), so one could readily argue that the thematic connections are in fact evidence of the influence on Toole of Salinger's book. However, there has been no exploration of the connection between ACoD and Franny and Zooey. For example, Franny is apparently an attractive young woman, but she finds the world around her shallow and cannot bring herself to participate in the society around her. Confederacy has its own recluse who rejects his society and who is sometimes mistaken for being female.

Thesis: Explore possible connections between Confederacy and Franny and Zooey.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #14: McCluskey

As I said in June 2013, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship on Toole's Confederacy that is findable via MLA Bibliography (as opposed to obscure). Here is item number fourteen:

Citation: McCluskey, Peter M. "Selling Souls and Vending Paradise: God and Commerce in A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2009): 7-22.

Annotation: This article offers a detailed comparison between Confederacy and Thoreau’s Walden. McCluskey does an excellent job of discussing the pervasive theme of the corrupting influence of the pursuit of money on the soul. He demonstrates parallels of thought between statements by Ignatius Reilly and Walden’s narrator. He asserts strongly that “the resemblance cannot be coincidental” (8). The basic problem with the thesis is that many varied prophets and sages have been taking very similar philosophical positions for millennia, and the question is: why pick Thoreau? McCluskey admits that there are no direct references to Walden, but he claims that Ignatius’s bean plants refer to the beans that Thoreau grew at Walden Pond. As much as I myself enjoy such speculation, that is a thin reed for supporting the thesis. McCluskey claims that the beans Ignatius grows at Levy Pants might be a species of bean with the scientific name Strychnos ignatii, which happen to be poisonous. But there is no clue in the text that they are poisonous; instead, their function seems to be a hint that Ignatius does no productive work at Levy Pants, by entwining the handles of the file cabinets. Interesting, McCluskey quotes a passage from Chaucer about the corrupting influence of money, but he does not suggest that the influence on Toole was Chaucer. The Toole Papers at Tulane contain no references to Thoreau; whereas, they contain three assignments regarding Chaucer. While this fact does not prove that Toole was not influenced by Walden, it nevertheless withholds evidentiary support for McCluskey’s thesis. This article does a better job of analyzing the corruption theme in Confederacy than other articles (for example, Daigrepont), but the connection to Thoreau is not compelling.

More comments on Purdie's Comedy: Mastery of Discourse

In August, I offered criticism of Purdie's Comedy: Mastery of Discourse. I actually had not finished the book at that time. Now that I am done, I want to comment on the ending.

Purdie laments the heavy influence of the Northrup Frye school of theory on comedy, and the related theories of Frazer's Golden Bough and Samuel Barber's theory of Saturnalia, complaining that many critics accept the paradigm uncritically even though it is unproven. I will not argue with her assessment. I have not studied carefully enough the positions of the critics of Frazer and the Golden Bough to have a sense of whether her criticism is fully warranted.

By the same token, however, her own book accepts the paradigm of Lacan just as uncritically, and Lacan's theories are just as unfalsifiable as Northrup Frye's are. Alas.

My own criticism of Toole's Confederacy of Dunces does use the Saturnalian theory of carnival. However, I do not make claims that the theory is itself a valid way to interpret all carnival events. My claim is that Toole himself was aware of the saturnalian theory and wrote Confederacy with an eye to that theory. So the Saturnalian theme is in the book, whether or not it is a valid way to analyze all comedy. One can make that claim in the same way that one can analyze Eliot's "Waste Land" using Frazer's Golden Bough, without necessarily endorsing Frazer's theory. One can do this because Eliot was so explicit about being influenced by Frazer. Frazer's themes are in the poem, whether or not Frazer's theory validly explains all primitive agricultural rituals and all comedy based on those rituals.

Theory of Humor, Purdie's Discourse Theory

I have been chipping away at a paper on the humor in Confederacy of Dunces. I have not made much headway. However, I can comment on some of the texts which I am studying.

Recently, I have been reading Susan Purdie's book, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (University of Toronto, 1993). I find much to like in its examination of disparaging humor. However, she comes to the topic from Lacanian psychoanalysis and theory of language. I find Lacan to be largely bogus, so in her grand gestures toward a philosophy of humor, I find I disagree with her on the most fundamental level (although she might say that this disagreement is a display of my patriarchal discursive power). Still, at the level below the largest scale, I find she makes many good observations and will probably quote her if I ever get this paper written.

Things I like about the book: I like the point that there is a power dynamic in social relationships and that humor can be used with in that dynamic. So she makes a good point that we laugh at someone who is aspiring to an undeserved status. I can even go along with her distinction of the inept-speaker construction versus the low-status-person construction. Her analysis of gender and humor is good.

Things I do not like about the book: Purdie sees all human thought and subjectivity as being mediated by language. So all humor is language-based. I follow Steven Pinker on the division of thought and language. Purdie also brings in Freudian and Marxist ideas that are unnecessary to her immediate arguments and that do not stand up well to scrutiny, even her own scrutiny.

The book's basic thesis is that all joking (all humor folded into language) is a violation of the normal rules of discourse; however, both the Teller and the Audience understand the violation, so the violating language is marked off and acknowledged to be violating. So the Teller proves his or her mastery of language by a controlled violation of its conventions. I much prefer Mulkay's book On Humour (1988). It divides communication (and mental states) into serious mode and humorous mode. The controlled violation in Purdie's book can be seen as humorous mode in Mulkay's construction.

Mr. Bean's theory of the physical comedy hero, never mind

As I mentioned in my blog post in July of 2015, I am working on an article on the humor in A Confederacy of Dunces. In that post, I appealed to anyone who might know the source of a list of qualities articulated in a documentary starring Rowan Atkinson. I was quite taken by the list of qualities of the physical comedy hero.

Since then, I have done a good deal of reading in the theory of comedy, and I have come to the conclusion that the list from the documentary is not correct. That list is an excellent description of characteristics for many heroes of physical comedy, but it does not actually define physical comedy. Many of the items in the list describe humor that is disparaging, which physical comedy often is. However, the basis of physical comedy is physicality, not disparagement.

So for all those of you who wrote in trying to help me with the source of the list .... wait, no one ever wrote in. Oh well, till next time.

My research cited by other texts

Here are a few texts that cite my JKT research.

MacLauchlin, Cory. (2012). Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Da Capo Press. This book cites Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0.

Marsh, Leslie. (2013). "Review of: Butterfly in the Typewriter," Journal of Mind and Behavior, v. 34(3-4): 285-298. This article cites both Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0, and my "Dialectic of American Humanism" article.

Lickhardt, Maren. (2014). "Zeitgenossische Pikareske als Kulturkritik," Zeitschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik v. 44, 92-118. This article cites Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #13: Zaenker Hrotsvit

As I said in June 2013, I would like to offer an annotated bibliography, one citation at a time, of the best of the scholarship on Toole's Confederacy that is findable via MLA Bibliography (as opposed to obscure). Here is item number thirteen:

Citation: Zaenker, Karl A. “Hrotsvit and the Moderns: Her Impact on John Kennedy Toole and Peter Hacks.” In Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Rara Avis in Saxonia? Edited by Katharina M. Wilson. Ann Arbor: Marc, 1987, 275-285.

Annotation: Zaenker argues that Ignatius represents the opposite of Hrotsvit’s ascetic ideals. His cloister is a place of masturbation and orgies of junk food. Ignatius’s pamphlet defending Hrotsvit indicates that Toole knew about the Aschbach controversy of the nineteenth century, which claimed that she did not exist. However, the typical Hrotsvit plot is “the holy man descending into the den of iniquity and saving a fallen woman from prostitution” (278), and Confederacy ends with a parody of it. Zaenker concludes that Ignatius’s world is without transcendence, and the parody indicates that the secularization of that world is complete (279). Ignatius’s medievalism is a result of his psychosis. Zaenker's essay ignores Ignatius’s scapegoat role and his Neoplatonism in drag, but it is basically a good article that adds to the list of authors whom Toole references.

John Kennedy Toole Research website now responsive

Thanks to the hard work of Allyson Wehrs, code crafter extraordinaire, my John Kennedy Toole Research website is now responsive for mobile devices. It looks marvelous, simply marvelous.

Google Scholar now links to "Evidence of Influences," 2.0 on Researchgate

In mid-February, Google Scholar finally linked to the Researchgate version of my paper Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0. On February 6, the link to the paper (on course1.winona.edu) was still dead, but by February 13, the Researchgate link was up and running. Thanks, Google Scholar.

Findability of texts is a curious problem on the Internet. On February 2, right after I had taken down my course1 copy of Evidences 2.0, a couple of users found my website via search engines, evidently hunting for the 2.0 version of the paper. These users apparently experienced the dead link in Google Scholar and were hunting for the text on the open Internet. Oddly, users could find the webpage for the Researchgate copy of the paper through regular Google, but not through Google Scholar.

The fact that users were looking for the paper when they would have directly downloaded it before confirmed for me why I moved the paper: Back when the only copy of the paper was on the course1 server, I could not tell how many times it was downloaded because I did not have access to the log statistics. Now I have usage statistics.

Researchgate statistics: On January 26, 2016, Evidence had 19 reads on RG, and on February 29, it had 33 reads.

Deleting Evidence of Influences, 2.0, from my website

Today, I am deleting the copy of Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0 from my course1 website, despite the fact that it is cited by the scholarly literature (even literature that I myself did not write). I am disappointed in my own website, because our administrators have not given me access to the log information that would allow me to know how many times the paper has been downloaded. I will continue to maintain the copy on ResearchGate, which is at: Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer.

This strategy is a bit risky, because Google Scholar has not yet picked up the link to the ResearchGate copy, and I strongly suspect that Google Scholar generates a majority of the traffic to the paper.

Confederacy of Dunces and the movie Elf

I was watching the movie Elf this past week, and I had an idea. This idea is, IMHO, not worthy of being part of my occasional series of Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on Confederacy of Dunce, but it is good enough for a blog post during the holiday season.

Both Ignatius Reilly of Confederacy of Dunces and Buddy from Elf are immature, slapstick heroes whose disruptive behavior upsets a dysfunctional social order, allowing a comic happy ending.

Thesis: Compare Ignatius from Confederacy of Dunces to Buddy in the movie Elf.

My Initial Thoughts:

There is a huge difference between both those two characters and their narratives. Buddy is a more sympathetic man who is honest in his attraction to women and who, in the end, inspires faith in others and gets the girl. His actions help get his father to decide to quit his high-paid job where he was dishonest, start his own company, and spend more time caring for his family.

Ignatius, by contrast, is more of a pompous rogue and a trickster. He is childish, rather than child-like. Even at the end of the book, he thinks he is using Myrna as a vehicle for escape rather than genuinely forming a new relationship. Confederacy also has a more sustained and sharp criticism of modern consumer culture. Some of Ignatius's observations about the society around him hit the mark, while Elf promotes consumerism. But Ignatius's own position is ludicrous, thereby allowing a critique of Renaissance humanistic ideas as well.

Bottom line: The plots have some comic similarities, but Confederacy is more complex both in its ideas and in its ending.

Post Script

Google Scholar still has not added the Research Gate link to this paper: Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer. Get to it, people.