Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #5

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).

In August of 2013, I offered #2, admitting that there is a small crowd, all of which could be #2. My pick for #5 is part of that group. Here it is:

Citation: Pugh, Tison. "‘It’s Prolly Fulla Dirty Stories’: Masturbatory Allegory and Queer Medievalism in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces." Studies in Medievalism 15, (2006): 77-100.

Annotation: Pugh focuses in on the gender boundary transgressions in Confederacy (87-95). Pugh uses “queer” to mean simply any distortion of traditional sexual norms, and not necessarily a homosexual orientation. His thesis is, first, that "sexual desires disrupt normative constructions of identity and allegorical meaning within its fictions," and second, that “Ignatius's medievalism, as it estranges him from the social world around him, also models for the reader the sheer pleasure of queering medievalisms” (77). Confederacy is an allegory of perversion and a perversion of allegory. Pugh compares Ignatius to Ignatius Loyola in detail and Christ and Cain briefly. He briefly compares Confederacy to Dante’s Inferno and to Arthurian quests for a grail. While I disagree with Pugh’s ideas about Ignatius’s own motivations (I prefer those by Patteson and Sauret), he defends them well. Well done.