MLA Bibliography has indexed Refutation of Robert Byrne

I realize that MLA Bibliography might not be the most well-funded operation on Earth. As chronicled here earlier, they skipped over the issue of the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature in which my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" appeared. So I contacted them and even scanned the entire issue into a PDF and sent it to them with my own abstract for "Refutation."

Well, MLA has finally indexed the article. Click here for the record in that database if you are on a college campus that has licensed access to MLA Bibliography through the library vendor EBSCO. That record will not, however, provide you with direct access to the full text of the article, but if your campus has a link resolver, you may be able to link out from the MLA Bibliography record to the actual text in another database. However, MLA did not use the abstract that I provided and they have not yet indexed the issue of Renascence which contains my article "Dialectic of American Humanism." Click here for my abstract for "Refutation," and click here for my abstract of "Dialectic."

Transcript of Lecture "Dialectic of American Humanism" available

When I gave a lecture on the content of my Renascence article "The Dialectic of American Humanism" in March of 2012, I wrote the entire lecture script out. I have now made the script of the lecture available. Click here for the transcript. For the blog announcement of the lecture, click here.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 14

Thesis #14: Toole and Proust via Waugh

In an article on Waugh and Proust ("Remembrance of Things Past: Proustian Elements in Evelyn Waugh 's Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, vol. 18, no. 3, 1984, pp. 1-5), Hodgson discusses Waugh's intertextual references to Proust's work in Brideshead Revisited. For his part, Ignatius in Confederacy declares that he has Proustian qualities.

New Orleans was famous for mocking nobility. (See Tallant's Mardi Gras for an tale about mocking the Russian Archduke, and then read Mitchell's book All on a Mardi Gras Day for a refutation of Tallent's story.) Old families of New Orleans had a sense of entitlement that was fading, but the Carnival element of New Orleans culture simultaneously celebrates that desire for nobility and mocks it. For their part, Waugh and Proust both mourned the loss of the refined, aristocratic culture of the 19th century.

Thesis: How does the relationship between Waugh and Proust alter the burlesquing of a longing for medieval traditions that one finds in Confederacy? One could throw in a discussion of the theme of the visual arts and art criticism from Proust, Brideshead, and Confederacy.

More Access to Articles in online Databases

Gale now has "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" in InfoTrac Student Edition. You can even have the computer read the text out loud to you.

Also, the PDF of "Dialectic of American Humanism" from Academic Search Premier is more sophisticated (but larger) than the one from Gale Expanded Academic. With the one from Academic Search, the PDF (7 Meg) has stored the text, so you can search for keywords. You cannot search for text in the Expanded Academic PDF (3 Meg). However, Expanded Academic does have a "Full text in html" version of Dialectic, so with that one also, you can get the computer to read the text out loud to you.

Finally, I am not sure Google Scholar will ever have these two articles cited. Why? If you read their instructions to publishers, the publisher has to have an indexable website of the contents of the journal including abstracts of the articles. Neither journal has a website with abstracts to the articles. So, despite the fact that citations in Web of Science are generally more selective and thereby less numerous than in Google Scholar, Web of Science will have an entry for my Chaucer/Toole paper "Evidence of Influences" before Google Scholar will.

The Occasional Series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 13

Evelyn Waugh and Toole, part 2, Neoplatonism

As described above, Toole read Waugh, especially Brideshead Revisited. Beyond the theme of ritual scapegoat, Confederacy shares other themes with Brideshead. For example, Waugh plays with the theme of homosexuality (bk 1 chap 2) and its relation to the medieval and renaissance Neoplatonic ideas that love for another human is a foretaste of human love for God (bk 2 chap 4). Confederacy plays with roughly the same connection between homosexuality and love of ones fellow man in the "Save the World Through Degeneracy" campaign. See my paper "The Dialectic of American Humanism" regarding Toole's use of Ficino and Neoplatonism.

I have tried to find a literary study of Brideshead from prior to 1961 (when Toole started planning Confederacy) that discusses the Neoplatonic elements of Brideshead, and I have not found it. So one cannot point to a critical text as a possible inspiration to Toole to use Neoplatonism in his own novel. I have found the Stopp book, Evelyn Waugh: Portrait of the Artist (Princeton, 1958), to be useful. A more recent study that does discuss the Neoplatonic elements of Brideshead is the book by Robert M. Davis called Brideshead Revisited: the Past Redeemed (Boston: Twayne, 1990).

One huge difference between Waugh and Toole is that Waugh embraced Neoplatonism, while Toole critiqued it by making Ignatius a Carnival version of Ficino's philosophy. In his book The Creative Element (Hamish Hamilton, 1953), Stephen Spender examines Brideshead in chapter 9. He argues that the main character, Ryder, is ultimately shallow. The essay ends, "It is when [Waugh] identifies his prejudices with a moralizing religion that qualities anachronistic and absurd in his view of life--intolerance, bigotry, and self-righteousness--work against his talent, and even tend to caricature the very ideas he is supposed to be supporting" (174) Toole could have been aware of the contents of Spender's essay.

Thesis: Discuss the Neoplatonic aspects of both Confederacy of Dunces and Brideshead Revisited. Include a comparison of their approaches to Neoplatonism and homosexuality.

Dialectic is now in Expanded Academic ASAP

Regarding my last posting, Gale Cengage has finally added the vol. 64, no. 2, issue of the journal Renascence to their online library database. If you are on a college campus and your college subscribes to Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP" database (check your library's website), you should be able to access the article by searching that database for "Dialectic of American Humanism" in quotation marks. Thanks, Gale! (But Gale still has not added the issue of Notes on Contemporary Literature that contains "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" to its "InfoTrac Student Edition" database. So a muted thanks.)

Library Databases: Negligence or Conspiracy??

My scholarly studies of John Kennedy Toole seem to have picked up some of the "curse of John Kennedy Toole," though obviously not as much of the curse as Toole himself or the actors lined up to star in the movie version of Confederacy of Dunces.

I published an article in the January, 2012, issue of the journal Notes on Contemporary Literature. That journal is aggregated full text in the database "Gale InfoTrac Student Edition." However, Gale skipped over the issue in which my article appeared (volume 42, number 1) and has gone on to load the two subsequent issues. The database "MLA Bibliography" from the Modern Language Association is also supposed to index the contents of Notes on Contemporary Literature, but they also have skipped over issue 42, number 1. Google Scholar likewise has not indexed that issue of that journal. So my article "A Refutation of Robert Byrne" is unfindable to those searching in online library databases. (Fortunately, it is mostly an extract from my freely available study "Evidence of Influences".)

Next, I published an article in the Spring, 2012, issue of the journal Renascence (volume 64, number 2). For this journal, the full text is supposed to be available in both EBSCO's database "Academic Search" and Gale's "Expanded Academic ASAP." It has become available via "Academic Search" (thank you EBSCO!), but the Gale database once again skipped over the issue in which my article appears. The issue has also not yet been indexed in "MLA Bibliography" or in "Google Scholar." ISI's "Web of Science" has also indexed that issue of Renascence (thank you Thomson Reuters!). So my article "The Dialectic of American Humanism" is available, but only in two out of five databases.

(In a side note, EBSCO created a decent abstract and subject headings for my Dialectic article, but I have my own unpublished abstract for the article.)

It's almost enough to get you to suspect foul play, though negligence on the part of the creators of library databases is the more likely source of the problem.