Academic Studies of Jim Carroll

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."

William Nesbitt, "'Squirming in Circles Like Fumigated Bugs': Jim Carroll and Ecopoetics." Exclusive to The Jim Carroll Website (Spring 2021). 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.

Amme 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.

Jim Carroll Scholars (1996): Cassie Carter, David Gallant, Steve Perrin, Rich Campbell

Jim Carroll Scholars of the World Unite!

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