Google Scholar now links to "Evidence of Influences," 2.0 on Researchgate

In mid-February, Google Scholar finally linked to the Researchgate version of my paper Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0. On February 6, the link to the paper (on course1.winona.edu) was still dead, but by February 13, the Researchgate link was up and running. Thanks, Google Scholar.

Findability of texts is a curious problem on the Internet. On February 2, right after I had taken down my course1 copy of Evidences 2.0, a couple of users found my website via search engines, evidently hunting for the 2.0 version of the paper. These users apparently experienced the dead link in Google Scholar and were hunting for the text on the open Internet. Oddly, users could find the webpage for the Researchgate copy of the paper through regular Google, but not through Google Scholar.

The fact that users were looking for the paper when they would have directly downloaded it before confirmed for me why I moved the paper: Back when the only copy of the paper was on the course1 server, I could not tell how many times it was downloaded because I did not have access to the log statistics. Now I have usage statistics.

Researchgate statistics: On January 26, 2016, Evidence had 19 reads on RG, and on February 29, it had 33 reads.

Deleting Evidence of Influences, 2.0, from my website

Today, I am deleting the copy of Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer version 2.0 from my course1 website, despite the fact that it is cited by the scholarly literature (even literature that I myself did not write). I am disappointed in my own website, because our administrators have not given me access to the log information that would allow me to know how many times the paper has been downloaded. I will continue to maintain the copy on ResearchGate, which is at: Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer.

This strategy is a bit risky, because Google Scholar has not yet picked up the link to the ResearchGate copy, and I strongly suspect that Google Scholar generates a majority of the traffic to the paper.

Confederacy of Dunces and the movie Elf

I was watching the movie Elf this past week, and I had an idea. This idea is, IMHO, not worthy of being part of my occasional series of Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on Confederacy of Dunce, but it is good enough for a blog post during the holiday season.

Both Ignatius Reilly of Confederacy of Dunces and Buddy from Elf are immature, slapstick heroes whose disruptive behavior upsets a dysfunctional social order, allowing a comic happy ending.

Thesis: Compare Ignatius from Confederacy of Dunces to Buddy in the movie Elf.

My Initial Thoughts:

There is a huge difference between both those two characters and their narratives. Buddy is a more sympathetic man who is honest in his attraction to women and who, in the end, inspires faith in others and gets the girl. His actions help get his father to decide to quit his high-paid job where he was dishonest, start his own company, and spend more time caring for his family.

Ignatius, by contrast, is more of a pompous rogue and a trickster. He is childish, rather than child-like. Even at the end of the book, he thinks he is using Myrna as a vehicle for escape rather than genuinely forming a new relationship. Confederacy also has a more sustained and sharp criticism of modern consumer culture. Some of Ignatius's observations about the society around him hit the mark, while Elf promotes consumerism. But Ignatius's own position is ludicrous, thereby allowing a critique of Renaissance humanistic ideas as well.

Bottom line: The plots have some comic similarities, but Confederacy is more complex both in its ideas and in its ending.

Post Script

Google Scholar still has not added the Research Gate link to this paper: Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer. Get to it, people.

Moving Evidence of influences to Researchgate

It has annoyed me ever since I posted my paper Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer that I could not count how many users downloaded the PDF from my university's website. I didn't have access to the data. In the meantime, I have an account on Researchgate, and it has been bugging me to upload papers. It also tracks how many times they are "read" or downloaded. Perfect. Also, if Winona State ever cut off my ability to host web content, the paper would still be available, and Google Scholar links to Researchgate copies of papers. So here is the new link to the paper: Evidence of influences on John Kennedy Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," including Geoffrey Chaucer (2.0). As soon as Google Scholar links to it, I think I will take down the copy that is on my own university website.

Best of John Kennedy Toole Scholarship #12: Rudnicki, Proboscis

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 twelve:

Citation: Rudnicki, Robert. "Toole's Proboscis: Some Effluvial Concerns in the Neon Bible." Mississippi Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1994): 221-236.

Annotation: As the title indicates, this article is primarily about Neon Bible; however, it does make some interesting observations about Confederacy. For example, the protagonist of Neon Bible, David, rails against intolerance. Ignatius, on the other hand, “ironically epitomizes the very intolerance that David rails against and is continually victimized by” (229). Rudnicki extends Clark’s position, arguing that Confederacy and Neon Bible both deal with the victimization of children, but in the case of Confederacy, the pain is covered “with a thick layer of … satire and scatology”. David is thin, diligent and supportive of his mother. Ignatius is fat, lazy, and depends on his mother. It is not critical to read this article when studying Confederacy, though it underscores the theme of child abuse throughout Toole’s writings.

Who wrote Confederacy, Addendum

In my posting of November 1, 2013, I argued that Thelma Toole, John Kennedy Toole's mother, was instrumental in shaping the final version of the novel. In that posting, I suggested that one could consult the book From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts by Peter L. Shillingsburg for a discussion of the gray area between authorship and editorship. The point that the editor can approach the role of a co-author has been made many times in the past. An earlier text that discusses that point in more depth than Shillingsburg is:

Thorpe, James. “The Aesthetics of Textual Criticism,” PMLA 80.5 (December 1965): 465-82.

“In a quite literal sense, the literary work is often guided or directed or controlled by other people while the author is in the process of trying to make it take shape, and it is subject to a variety of alterations throughout its history. The intentions of the person we call the author thus become entangled with the intentions of all the others who have a stake in the outcome, which is the work of art.” (Thorpe, 475).

As I discussed in the earlier blog post, according to Fletcher's book Ken and Thelma, Thelma preferred the original first draft of the novel. In his efforts to get the book published, Ken wrote several revisions. After his death, Thelma told Fletcher that she had destroyed the revised versions and eventually published the original first draft.

One interesting aspect of this textual history is that most contemporary writers have their original vision altered by editors in part to try to market their work to a broad commercial audience. Writers like Chaucer did not have to revise for the expectations of a mass audience. In the end, Toole's original intention for the text was preserved by the initial rejection by Gottlieb and by Thelma's subsequent actions.

Carl Jung: Another contemporary who saw agent of chaos as an agent of order

In my paper Evidence of Influences, I argued that during Toole's academic career, Chaucer scholars, such as Charles Muscatine in 1957, argued that the character of Saturn in "The Knight's Tale" was an immediate agent of chaos, but ultimately was an agent of order within the larger pattern of the narrative (Leighton, 25).

I am currently enjoying the book Comedy, by Andrew Stott (Routledge, 2005). In the section on the Trickster character, he points out that Carl Jung saw the trickster archetype as a mirror of the development of human consciousness from savage to sophisticated, and as such, it was an immediate agent of chaos who ultimately is an agent of order and comic resolution (Stott, 54). The quote from Jung is from his Collected Works from 1959, though the text was probably written much earlier. Nevertheless, 1959 was just about the time Toole was formulating the ideas for Confederacy, and Jung's ideas may have been more prominent in the intellectual ferment of that time.

The quote from Jung is: "The marks of deepest unconsciousness fall away from him; instead of acting in a brutal, savage, stupid, and senseless fastion, the trickster's behavior towards the end of the cycle becomes quite useful and sensible." (Collected Works, v. 9: 266, as quoted in Stott, 54). So the concept appears to have been broadly present in literary culture at the time when Toole was creating his novel.