Thursday, August 1, 2013

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #2

As I said in June, 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).

Picking a number two is very difficult, since after the Patteson and Sauret essay, I think there are about a half dozen essays that are in a photo finish for second. In particular, three of them--the ones by Beste, Gatewood, and Williams--are already discussed in my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole's .... Here is the one from MLA Bibliography that I have picked for #2 (among the non-obscure scholarship):

Citation: Dunne, Sara L. "Moviegoing in the Modern Novel: Holden, Binx, Ignatius." Studies in Popular Culture [ISSN 0888-5753] v. 28, no. 1 (2005): 37-47.

Annotation: This article is a well-written exploration of the movie-going connections among Catcher in the Rye, The Moviegoer, and Confederacy. According to Dunne, The Moviegoer "owes much to" Catcher in the Rye (37), and Confederacy can be seen as sharing many important film-related themes and motifs with both of them. Dunne uses Mulvey’s theory of screen gaze to decode Ignatius’s experience of film in Lacanian terms. She offers interpretations of Ignatius’s multi-colored eyes. One could extend her observations to hypothesize that Salinger and Percy actually influenced Toole. Evidence within the Toole Papers at Tulane confirm that Toole was familiar with both writers: Toole explicitly praised Catcher in the Rye in his writings, and he owned a first edition copy of The Moviegoer at the time of his death.