David McNeil - Interdiscipinary Research - Selected Essays

• "Musical Counterpoint in the Film Captivity Scene: Examples from Leone, Kubrick and Scott (with a coda from Squid Game)".
  This essay was originally written circa 1995 and updated 2025. While Film Studies is now a recognizable discipline, it may also be understood as the combination of two distinct art forms: the motion picture and music, and music was an important part of film even before sound syncronization and the "talkie" first emerged in 1929. Charlie Chaplin was frank about employing music to "counterpoint" the visual action: ""I tried to compose elegant music to frame my comedies in contrast to the tramp character, for elegant music gave my comedies an emotional dimension. . . . I wanted the music to be a counterpoint of grace and charm" (My Autobiography, Bodley Head, p. 355).



• "Infinite Diversion: David Foster Wallace on Tennis, or the Writing That Brought Joy" .
  Written circa 2010; updated 2025. Here I attempt to link the manic phase of those suffering from bipolar disorder to the maximalist literary style (also known as Menippean satire). While focusing on Wallace's writing about tennis in both his journalism and his fiction, the essay (itself a kind of maximalist piece) traces both the satiric tradition (Burton, Rabelais, etc.) and the idea of the therapeutic value of exercise or active engagement.



• "Collage and social theories: An examination of Bowles's 'Medley' prints of the 1720 South Sea Bubble".
  In this analysis, I link the theory of deindividuation, or crowd behavior, to a pair of "Medley" (i.e., collage-like) prints that address/celebrate the folly of the 1720 stock-market crash known as "the South Sea Bubble." In effect, it is an attempt to draw fundamental connections beween social psychology and the visual arts. Published in 2004, the essay was made available online in 2010.



• "The Spectacle of Protest and Punishment: Newspaper coverage of the Melksham Weavers' Riot of 1738".
  This essay uses the social theory of the spectacle, as developed by Debord, MacAloon, et al to shed light on the newspaper coverage of a riot and its subsequent trials/executions. The initial support for the cause of the rioters eventually turns in favour of the mill-owners as the private presses seem to succumb to the economic strength of the latter. Published in 2001, the essay was made available online in 2010.



• "The Musicalization of Fiction: The Virtuosity of Anthony Burgess".
  This article traces the close parallel (scene by scene / bar by bar) between Burgess' biographical novel on Napoleon and Beethoven's 3rd Symphony. Originally published in Mosaic (1983), a journal specializing in interdisciplinary research.



• "Anthony Burgress: Composer of Comic Fiction".
  From Joyce to Huxley Twenthieth-century fiction has a long history of attempts to construct itself on musical form (e.g., couterpoint, the fugue or sonata). With Anthony Burgess one finds a self-proclaimed failed composer turning to fiction to earn a living. Ethnic identities clash in Burgess' early comic novels, but only to produce comic scenes. The layers of narrative development follow a fugue-like structure. Originally published in the International Fiction Review in 1983.

Updated: Nov. 27, 2025.