by H. Vernon Leighton, Krueger Library, Winona State University
This page is the new (2026) homepage for my research blog. My blog began with the name The John Kennedy Toole Research Blog, because it was focused on my scholarship regarding the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. My research has expanded to include testing of AI LLMs, explorations of the Theory of Humor (as in mirth), literary criticism and theory in general, Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC) in particular, and most recently, Cultural Evolutionary Literary Criticism (CELC). On November 4, 2026, I discovered that Google Search no longer indexed my research blog. The whole point of having a research blog is so that people can find my writings, and the primary vehicle for findability is Google Search. I have created this page in the hopes that Google Search will find entries to my blog and once again make them findable.
At this point, I continue to plan to make the blog posts themselves on the free blogspot.com domain, which is run by Google itself. By creating links on this static page, I hope to get the algorithm to index my content.
The link to the entire blog: John Kennedy Toole Research, the Blog
Categories of Blog Entries
Discussions of John Kennedy Toole
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Robert Byrne and Ignatius: Communication with Maurice duQuesnay
This entry, posted in August of 2018, discusses my correspondence with Maurice duQuesnay, who knew both John Kennedy Toole and Robert Byrne, which is the obvious model for much of the behavior of the character Ignatius J. Reilly. Here is a quote: “Prof. duQuesnay is a defender and supporter of Robert Byrne. He sees it as unfair that Bryne is identified with Ignatius Reilly. What I found interesting about the memorial is that, although Ignatius is not an exact copy of Byrne–and Byrne had many qualities Ignatius lacks–even in duQuesnay’s positive description, you can easily see that Ignatius is indeed an exaggerated caricature of Byrne.”
Discussions of The Theory of Humor
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Personality Traits of Hero in Physical Comedy
This entry, posted in July of 2015, lists the nine personality traits of a hero of a physical comedy as listed by a video featuring Rowan Atkinson. In a later blog post, I argued that this list does not get to the essence of physical comedy. Still, it is a good list.
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Theory of Humor Series, part 2, What is Humor anyway?
This entry, posted in July of 2017, offers a formal definition of humor taken from the book The Psychology of Humor by Rod Martin (Elsevier, 2007). Four parts of the definition are: 1) humor has a social context, 2) cognitive and perceptual processes have to function, 3) there is an emotional component which can be called mirth, and 4) laughter is an expression of mirth. Laughter is a social signal and can be infectious.