Newsletter of the

Society

Inside...

Other Newsletters

Return to home page

With the present bibliographic essay, summarizing work on Porter reported in the M.L.A. Bibliography for 1995, we continue a feature of the Newsletter of the Katherine Anne Porter Society initiated in Volume 3 (1997).

Items on Porter either published in 1995 or belatedly reported in the MLA bibliography for 1995 were less numerous than those for 1994. The list of books, articles, chapters, and dissertations that follows comes to only six. We are all accustomed to the ebbing and flowing of scholarly trends. It remains to be seen whether this drop in scholarly activity on Porter is indicative of such a trend or only an aberration.

To repeat: My plan for this annual feature of the newsletter is to use the MLA bibliography as the source, working from both the topical listing provided for "Porter, Katherine Anne" and the keyword listing, to the limit of my own intuition as to likely keywords. For dissertations, the report will be based on the abstracts published in DAI. I do not plan to list materials that contain only passing reference to Porter, since it would be virtually impossible to define the limits of such a survey.

Books

None.

Articles, Essays, and Chapters in Books

Publications in journals and edited volumes in 1995 did not continue the spirited pace of Porter scholarship we saw in the preceding decade and a half. I can report on only the following four essays--plus an extra.

John Blair's "South by Southwest: Texas and the Deep South in the Stories of Katherine Anne Porter," Journal of the Southwest 37 (1995): 495-502, takes up a topic of continuing interest: the dissonance between Porter's development of a self-myth linked with the Old South and her actual roots in an area and society more accurately described as the Southwest or the New South. Some readers may find that this essay adds little to the discussion of the topic in Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: An Uneasy Relationship (Texas A & M University Press, 1990). On the other hand, the essay provides a concise summary of prevalent thinking on the issue. Descriptions of the "fabled" Amy as "sedate" and of the Grandmother's governance as "paternalistic" are surprising. Blair concludes that Porter "works . . . out" her own childhood in the Miranda stories, the "most strongly southern" of all her works, but "the evidence seems to be that she borrowed freely from the more general family romance that attends the image of Southern aristocracy" in doing so.

Ann L. Putnam's "'Tangled Together Like Badly Cast Fishing Line': The Reader and the Text in Katherine Anne Porter's 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider'," pp. 3-10 in Private Voices, Public Lives: Women Speak on the Literary Life, ed. Nancy Owen Nelson (University of North Texas Press, 1995) is a chapter in an innovative volume of essays on the life of literary scholarship as perceived by women who are willing to speak directly and in a personal tone. The volume as a whole deserves to be widely read and pondered. Putnam uses the "conflict between autonomy and connectedness" in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" as a basis for discussing her own "struggl[e] to balance the claims of connectedness and a sense of my own work in the world."

Robert O. Stephens includes a chapter on Porter and Welty, called "The Matriarchs on the Porch," in his book The Family Saga in the South: Generations and Destinies (Louisiana State University Press, 1995). His treatment, limited to the Miranda stories, emphasizes their matriarchal vision and Nannie Gay's role as "Keeper of the talismanic family treasures."

Jan Whitt, in "'The Truth About What Happens': Katherine Anne Porter and Journalism," Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas 26 (1995): 16-35, argues that in stylistic and other respects Porter's "career in media most certainly affected her development as a writer of fiction," and did so in beneficial ways, but that in The Never-Ending Wrong Porter became so "overly involved" in the issue that she is "suspect as a reliable witness." The essay reiterates well-established ideas, but with fresh emphasis on the journalistic experience and a conjecture that Porter "may have left journalism to avoid the rampant sexism present there."

Contrary to my own best resolve (see above), I want to mention a brief reference to Porter (just two paragraphs on "Pale Horse, Pale Rider") in an essay by Margaret Higonnet in the volume Death and Representation, ed. Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elisabeth Bronfen (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 192-209, simply because an idea Higonnet proposes is so different from the prevailing interpretation and so thought-provoking. The proposition Higonnet develops in "Women in the Forbidden Zone: War, Women,and Death" is that Miranda's experience of near-death "aligns her with Adam rather than separating them" and "sets them apart from the moral death of a jingoistic society."

Dissertations

The one dissertation on Porter that I can report from the 1995 bibliography, Nancy Pollina Ford's "Tropes, Exempla, and the Rhetoric of a Feminine Corrective in Selected Short Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter," was actually reported in the last issue of the newsletter, but shouldn't have been (under my own system), since it was not listed in the MLA Bibliography until the volume for 1995--even though the dissertation was actually completed in 1994. It is a rhetorical analysis of thirteen stories indicating that Porter's "rhetorical stance suggests a feminine corrective that is decidedly political."

If anyone wishes to send addenda for incorporation into the next report, my e-mail address is j-stout@tamu.edu, and paper-mail address is Department of English, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4227.