Commedia dell'arte and Confederacy of Dunces ... Not!: The Occasional series of Ideas for Papers on John Kennedy Toole, Part 30

A few years ago, a scholarly journal (which will remain nameless for confidentiality) asked me to review a submission related to the novel Confederacy of Dunces. I dutifully read the paper and critiqued it. The submitted paper explored the relationship between the Renaissance theatrical tradition of Commedia dell'arte and Confederacy of Dunces.

I am no expert on commedia dell'arte, but I have studied the subject a little, and I have contemplated writing a paper on Confederacy of Dunces and commedia dell'arte myself. The author(s) of the paper I reviewed described commedia dell'arte well. They then tried to argue that Confederacy of Dunces was an example of commedia dell'arte. What struck me was that, based on their own articulation of the genre, Confederacy of Dunces is not an example of commedia dell'arte. In my critique, I praised their attempt, but argued that they should reverse their conclusion, and I detailed why.

I realize that negative results are less likely to be reported, whether they are in the physical sciences, the social sciences, or elsewhere, but they are important to the scholarly endeavor. They are not glamorous, but they are important. The paper I reviewed has not, to my knowledge, been published, nor has any other paper on the topic. Still, such a study is worth doing.

Thesis: Describe commedia dell'arte and show why Confederacy of Dunces is not best described through the framework of that theatrical genre. This thesis cannot be handled in a run-of-the-mill term paper, but at least a master's thesis.