Book-length Discussions
Cassie Carter, “Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries and Forced Entries.” MA Thesis, 1990.
This was the first MA thesis written about Carroll.
Scholarly Articles
J. A. Carpenter, “Nightclubbing.” Exclusive to The Jim Carroll Website.
Carpenter offers an insightful line-by-line analysis of Carroll’s
poem “Nightclubbing.”
Cassie Carter, “Sick Bird: Biography of a Poem.” Exclusive
to The Jim Carroll Website (1999).
This is a “biography” of the development of this poem
from its birth to its publication in Void of Course, analyzing
four revisions over three years based on handwritten verse and
live performances.
Cassie Carter, “A Sickness That Takes Years to Perfect:
Jim Carroll’s Alchemical Vision.” Dionysos: Literature
and Addiction, 1996.
This is my own article, which focuses on drug use and addiction
in Carroll’s life and work from Organic Trains to “8
Fragments for Kurt Cobain.” I argue that Carroll’s goal is
always to achieve purity, and while drugs play a crucial role
in this quest, the nature of that role is continually changing.
Cassie Carter [Kuennen], Jim Carroll: An Annotated, Selective, Primary
and Secondary Bibliography, 1967-1988 Bulletin of Bibliography
47.2 (1990): 81-112.
This was the first scholarly article published about Jim Carroll. It
is an annotated bibliography that covers works by and about Carroll
up to 1988. Printer-friendly format.
Cassie Carter [Kuennen], “Cheetah and Chimp: The Basketball
Diaries as Minor Literature.” 1989.
This is a paper I wrote for a theory course during my MA program.
It attempts to apply Deleuze and Guattari’s “minor literature”
model to The Basketball Diaries.
Jason Middleton, “Heroin Use, Gender, and Affect in Rock Subcultures.” Echo 1.1 (Fall 1999).
Middleton appoaches the topic of “heroin chic” from a cultural perspective, working to “uncover some of
the stakes in certain highly visible cultural formations surrounding heroin use, and the representations of these formations.”
XWilliam Nesbitt, “‘Squirming in Circles Like Fumigated Bugs’: Jim Carroll and Ecopoetics.”
Exclusive to The Jim Carroll Website (Spring 2021). View PDF
Nesbitt applies the framework of ecopoetics to Carroll’s “Tiny Tortures,” the poem “Praying Mantis,” and “I Shot a Deer.”
Stephen Perrin, from “Chasing the Dragon: The Junky as 20th Century
Hero.” Doctoral Dissertation, U of Manchester, 1993.
In this chapter from his dissertation, Perrin discusses Carroll,
Sid Vicious, and Danny Sugerman in relation to the Trickster myth.
As far as I know, this is the first fully-developed treatment
of Carroll’s work in a doctoral dissertation.
XAmme Willowson, comp. “Jim Carroll Dictionary.” Exclusive to
The Jim Carroll Website.
With the help of members of the Jim Carroll Listserver, Amme Willowson
has compiled a dictionary of slang terms found in Carroll’s works. Academic
Conference Papers
Cassie Carter, “Metamorphosis of a Cockroach: Jim Carroll’s
‘Tiny Tortures’ and the Paradox of Identity.” Midwest Popular
and American Culture Associations’ Conference, 1994.
This is a paper I presented at the Midwest Popular Culture and
American Culture Associations’ conference in Pittsburgh in 1994.
I focus on how the final sentence of “Tiny Tortures”
destabilizes when one considers the various points of view represented
in the text. Carroll says, “The point I was making is the
point that you get, then as now,” but “then” could
refer to himself in 1967, 1970, or in the early 1980s, and his
relationship to the “scene” he describes is different
in each period.
