Myrna Minkoff identified??

Recently I ran across a folk song written by a poet named Frances Myra Minkoff. She is best known for co-writing songs with Fred Hellerman of the Weavers, which was a folk group based in Greenwich Village in the 1950s. One of her anti-war songs was recorded by Harry Belafonte in 1963. So she was an active in New York about the time that John Kennedy Toole was studying at Columbia. In Confederacy of Dunces, Myrna Minkoff is a clueless, dogmatic leftist who carries a guitar and inflicts folk songs on listeners. I know nothing about Fran Minkoff's personality, so I cannot speculate on whether Ken Toole borrowed anything from her but her name and her penchance for counterculture folk lyrics, but I am willing to bet that the name of his character is adapted from her name.

John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #15: Hardin (though not necessarily the best)

I have been offering periodic reviews of articles in the mainstream scholarship ("mainstream" defined as indexed in the MLA International Bibliography). I have focused on the articles and theses that I thought were the best. However, some scholarship is influential and therefore important even when it is not IMHO among the best scholarship. Below, I review an article by Michael Hardin. I do not consider it among the top articles on Confederacy of Dunces, but it is influential because of its pathbreaking aspects. While I do not find his overall thesis as compelling as those of other critics, Hardin's article should be cited by other scholars because of his unique observations. So here I offer my critique.

Citation: Hardin, Michael. "Between Queer Performances: John Kennedy Toole's The Neon Bible and A Confederacy of Dunces." Southern Literary Journal 39, no. 2 (2007): 58-77.

Annotation: Hardin makes the case that the protagonists of both of John Kennedy Toole’s novels have queer (and specifically homosexual) identities. He reviews the same gender ambiguity that Pugh and Gatewood have reviewed, but he views it as an indication of a repressed gay identity rather than general gender transgression. He is critical of the (IMHO strong) claims of Clark and Miller that Ignatius displays infantilism. The article has some pluses: Hardin was the first critic to find several likely double entendres in Confederacy (for example, at the gay rally, Ignatius asks the crowd if they would turn their backs on their fellow man), and the comparison with Neon Bible is useful. Because it was the first to make some observations, if one writes about the queer aspects of Confederacy, one should read and cite this article. However, its thesis is not as compelling as those of Clark, Pugh, Gatewood, or Patteson and Sauret.

Review of a new obscure article on Toole

In the last couple of years, I have not kept up on reviewing articles on Confederacy of Dunces that do not appear in the MLA Bibliography. Here is a new review.

Pal, Abhijit. "A Confederacy of Dunces: Mental Illness in the Life and Work of John Kennedy Toole." Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 19, no. 6 (2013): 467-469.

This brief article simply reviews the evidence of mental illness in John Kennedy Toole's personal life and compares it to the attitude portrayed in A Confederacy of Dunces toward mental illness. The author points out that it was becoming fashionable in the scholarly literature and in popular narratives to question the effectiveness of psychiatry and to relativize mental health at the time that Toole was writing Confederacy. Not bad, but not groundbreaking. Light on scholarship.

The other reviews of obscure articles can be found at: http://course1.winona.edu/vleighton/toole/Toole_obscure_scholarship.html

Blog address changed

The address of this very blog on John Kennedy Toole Research has changed slightly. It now uses https: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com

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.