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This bibliographic essay, summarizing 1994 work and work belatedly reported in the M. L. A. Bibliography for 1994, initiates what is expected to be an annual feature of the newsletter. Certainly, greater timeliness would be desirable. It is hoped that 1996 will also see another innovation: semi-annual publication of the newsletter. If that goal can be achieved, I will expect to provide a second bibliographic essay this year, catching us up through the year's work of 1995, with a similar schedule to be continued thereafter.

My plan is to let the arrival of the print M. L. A. Bibliography in my mailbox serve as a trigger. Yes, I do realize that the bibliography is available on CD-Rom, updated quarterly and that reliance on the print volume is anachronistic. But allow me, please, my idiosyncrasies. I like the print version. I enjoy holding it, spreading it open on my desk, and marking its margins. Even more, I like having a reliable triggering mechanism for a commitment such as this. Once the bibliography arrives, then, I will undertake to obtain, read, and summarize all the listings shown under Porter's name, plus any others I delve up by consulting other keywords that strike me as likely sources. If my experience with the present year's listing is any indicator, that second category is not likely to turn up much. I decline to include materials that contain only passing references (there would be no end to the search), and passing references were all I found. But perhaps next year's will be different.

In the case of the dissertations I will consult DAI. My summary comments on dissertations, then, will be based on only the published abstracts; I do not plan to obtain complete dissertations from University Microfilms, even though I am confident that poring over them in full would be educational. This year only, the dissertation category will include past years' work as far back as 1990, in hope of bringing the Hilt and Alvarez bibliography that we have all found so useful up to date in that one category at least.

One prefatory word more: When I first began to think of undertaking this project, I determined that my annotations or comments would be strictly summary in nature, not evaluative. I have concluded, however, that such a policy would at times make the report of marginal usefulness. Evaluative observations, then, will occasionally appear. But I hope that they will never be of the snide variety that we have all seen at times.

With that, here is the listing of the year's work on KAP for 1994.

Books

None that I am aware of, although the period 1990-1993 produced some twelve books, including the Bayley edition of the letters, the Carr collection of reprinted essays on "Flowering Judas," the Clark and Machann volume of new essays on Porter and Texas, the revised edition of the Givner biography, two books on Porter published in India, and books by Alvarez and Walsh, Brinkmeyer, Stout, Tanner, and Walsh (the prize-winning Katherine Anne Porter and Mexico).

Articles and Essays and Chapters in Books

The year's publications in journals and edited volumes demonstrate that 1994 continued the spirited state of Porter scholarship in the past decade and a half. As we would expect, much of this body of work addressed Porter's short fiction (one article each on "Flowering Judas," "Old Mortality," and the "Old Order" group), but there were also articles on other parts of the oeuvre.

P. Jane Hafen's "Katherine Anne Porter's 'The Old Order' and Agamemnon," Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 491-93, is, as a note should be, quite focused. The identification of an allusion to Agamemnon's "hare, ripe, bursting with young unborn yet" in the slain pregnant rabbit of "The Grave" will strike some readers as strained.

Helge Normann Nilsen's "Laura Against Sexism: A Feminist Reading of Katherine Anne Porter's 'Flowering Judas,'" in Excursions in Fiction: Essays in Honour of Professor Lars Harveit on His 70th Birthday, ed. Andrew Kennedy and Orm Overland (Oslo: Novus Press, 1994), pp. 145-56, offers an argument that "feminism and rejection of radical, revolutionary politics are fused and amount to a sustained attack against patriarchal cruelties and injustices wherever they are found." Although this interpretive point is of interest, it is somewhat unsettling that the most recent scholarly or critical work on Porter cited is from 1986. Nilsen writes that Laura sometimes goes into churches "from the force of habit" and reads the male saint's "lace-trimmed drawers hang[ing] limply around his ankles" as meaning the drawers have fallen down, leaving the pitiful and illusory nature of religion and church . . . another patriarchal institution which has neglected to address the concerns of women."

Suzanne W. Jones's "Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne Porter's 'Old Mortality,'" in Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure, ed. Alison Booth (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), pp. 280-99, is quite another matter. Also a feminist reading, it is firmly grounded in theory, specifically, reader-response theory. The central argument can be well summarized in Jones's own concluding words: "Porter demonstrates the difficulty of reading or writing a story rather than being read or written by it--the problem of unconsciously playing out old plots, even after one has become a feminist reader aware of their dangers." The extensive notes include the complete text of an important letter to Porter from her bother Paul, dated March 23, 1909.

Another valuable contribution, Thomas Austenfeld's "Katherine Anne Porter Abroad: The Politics of Emotion," Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 27 (1994): 27-33, is indexed by M. L. A. as pertaining to Ship of Fools, but in fact treats the poem "After a Long Journey" as an indicator of a rhetoric of affectively-sensed politics in "The Leaning Tower" and the novel. It presents in brief form an argument that Porter's characters--and indeed she herself--"react to political events with the same emotional intensity with which they respond to family burials and other private matters, indeed with the same intense tug-of-war between fascination and repulsion which they usually reserve for their lovers." We can hope this essay will be reprinted in a volume that will make it more generally accessible.

The year's listing of articles on Porter is rounded out by two contributions of my own: "Something of a Reputation as a Radical: Katherine Anne Porter's Shifting Politics," South Central Review 10 (1993): 49-66, a study of her left-leaning politics and its Texas roots, and "Katherine Anne Porter's 'Reflections on Willa Cather': A Duplicitous Homage," American Literature 66 (1994): 719-35, a reading of that splendid essay of tribute to a sister writer that finds it to be not entirely a tribute.

Dissertations

It is notably evident in the abstracts of doctoral theses of the past several years, up through those degrees awarded in 1994, that treatments of Porter continue to see her in relation to feminist constructs, often quite aggressive ones. We cannot suppose that she would be happy, of course--but then, neither was she happy with being called, as she was for so long, a stylist.

Ruth M. Alvarez, "Katherine Anne Porter and Mexican Art," University of Maryland, 1990. The abstract of this dissertation is not published, but Alvarez's searching work on the roots of Porter's work in Mexican art is partially accessible in the editorial introductions in Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter (University of Texas Press, 1993).

Ricki Heller, "Action and Inaction in the Stories of Katherine Anne Porter," University of Toronto, 1991; DAI November 1993, A-1804. "St Augustine and the Bullfight" defines a spectrum of five basic types of behavior, from "passivity lacking insight" to "positive, productive action that is directed by clear vision." Characterization according to this spectrum of types provides "a unity to the canon."

Colleen Marie Tremonte, "The Variable Presence of Place: Narrative Construction in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter," Texas Christian University, 1991; DAI June 1992, A-4335, studies Porter's work from a socio-spatial perspective, using geographical, architectural, and sociological theory, and finds that her protagonist "ultimately acquires or rejects personal and/or social selfhood in accordance to perceptions of place."

Mary Michele Bendel-Simso, "The Politics of Reproduction: Demystifying Female Gender in Southern Literature," State University of New York at Binghampton, 1992; DAI June 1993, A-4318. Porter is treated along with Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Alice Walker in a study of female roles, especially a nondesiring and asexual motherhood, imposed as hegemonic structures in the South. The dissertation is grounded in the theories of Gramsci and Foucault.

Pearl Amelia McHaney, "The Monster upon the Bank: Eudora Welty's Book Reviews and Major Essays," Georgia State University, 1992; DAI January 1993, A-2371. Welty's essay on Porter is among those studies in demonstration of the "common threads of Welty's critical prose."

Colleen Warren, "A 'Hard Unwinking Angry Point of Light' and 'The Fluctuation of Starlight': Female Identity in the Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty," University of Florida, 1992; DAI July 1993, A-183. Porter's conception of female identity differs from Welty's in its emphasis on "constancy and singularity" rather than "multiplicity of identity." These conceptions "determine the degree and quality of their female protagonists' subjectivity, voice, objectification, and relationality."

Margaret Bauer, "The Fiction of Ellen Gilchrist: An Intertextual Reading with Works by Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and Kate Chopin," University of Tennessee, 1993; DAI December 1993, A-2147. Porter is seen, along with Hemingway, as am exemplar to whose work Gilchrist's responds in its development of "a composite personality for her extended story cycle."

Carol Vandeveer Hamilton, "Dynamite: Anarchy as Modernist Aesthetic," University of California, Berkeley, 1993; DAI May 1994, A-4087. Porter is included in the fourth chapter, entitled "Fellow Travelers: American Writers and the Sacco-Vanzetti Case." The dissertation seeks to "historicize and reconceptualize modernism as riven by revolutionary as well as reactionary impulses."

Nancy Pollina Ford, "Tropes, Exempla, and the Rhetoric of a Feminine Corrective in Selected Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter," University of Houston, 1994; DAI December 1994, A-1559. Rhetorical analysis of thirteen stories, leading to the conclusion that Porter "proposes options for women beyond the accepted gender roles." The positive and negative exempla discovered imply a "critique of the patriarchy."

Barbara Nealt Kelber, "Making Places: Writing Women of the American South," University of California, Riverside, 1994; DAI February 1995, A-2391. Porter is among "many southern authors, including Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, Carson McCullers, Bobbie Ann Mason, Laura Riding, and the Fugitive/Agrarian group, whose works are examined for their negotiation of the "conceptual space in which they have 'learned their place.'" Unlike male authors of their time, these writers envision a challenge of "the power of the white, eurocentric, middle class male" through the construction of alternative symbolic spaces.

Jeraldine Rachel Kraver, "Paris South: What a Generation Sought and Found in Post-Revolutionary Mexico," University of Kentucky, 1994; unfortunately, not in DAI.

Charlotte Megan Wright, "Plain and Ugly Janes: The Rise of Ugly Women in Contemporary American Fiction," University of North Texas, 1994; DAI March 1995, A-2837. The figure of the homely old maid in nineteenth-century American fiction becomes more recurrent, and her homeliness accentuated, in twentieth-century fiction, where the ugly woman is seen as exerting "power over her own life and the lives of others." Porter is among some twenty-six twentieth-century writers mentioned by name as being treated.

To anyone whose work I have missed I offer my heartiest apologies. My e-mail address is j-stout@tamu.edu, if you care to send me your addenda, which can be incorporated into the next report.