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Janis Stout's 1996 bibliographic essay ended with this challenge: "The need to supplement the report for 1995 in this essay prompts me to urge all of you Porter scholars out there to let me know if you find that your work has not been reported. Demand a higher standard! Even better, demand to write the bibliographic essay yourself!" I hasten to make clear the reason Janis did not produce this year's bibliographic essay. I did not demand to write the bibliographic essay myself! Because of her increased administrative responsibilities at Texas A&M University, Janis asked me if I would assume responsibility for the bibliographic essay. My reason momentarily addled by the surprising news that Janis, productive scholar and busy administrator, saw limitations on what she could accomplish in a year, I agreed to the task.

Some brief remarks about my approach are in order. Like Janis, I used the MLA bibliography as the source (the CD-ROM version, not the print version that Janis used), working only from the topical listing provided for "Porter, Katherine Anne" (Janis also used the keyword listing). Like Janis, I based my report on dissertations on the abstracts published in DAI. Although the CD-ROM version of MLA that I used included scholarship published in 1998, I have continued the tradition of the yearly bibliographic essay. Thus, the report focuses on scholarship published in 1997, although, like Janis, I have supplemented the previous year's report, including scholarship published in 1996 but not included in the 1996 bibliographic essay.

1996

Articles

Joan Givner, in "Letters to Lodwick: Uncovering the Hidden Life of Katherine Anne Porter," Southwest Review 81.1 (1996): 11-27, reflects on the complex relationship between biographer and subject and on the sustaining power of a friendship "developed on paper between two people who never met." Reviewing her correspondence with critic Lodwick Hartley during the period of years in which she was writing her Porter biography, Givner provides a fascinating account of her encounters with Porter's literary contemporaries (including Matthew Josephson, Malcolm Cowley, Eudora Welty, and Allen Tate), with early friends Erna Schlemmer Johns and Kitty Barry Crawford, and with Porter herself. However, her encounters with Hartley in their lively correspondence prove the most memorable for readers of Givner's article.

Merrill Skaggs, in "Willa Cather's Influence on Katherine Anne Porter's 'He,'" Southern Quarterly 34.2 (1996): 23-26, points out a number of striking resemblances between the title character of "He" and Marek, Antonia's youngest brother, in Cather's novel My Antonia and between the Whipple and Shimerda families in general. Skaggs does not tackle the difficult questions of influence and coincidence that these resemblances provoke, concentrating instead on identifying the "different ends" Porter and Cather pursue, "while sharing the same characters." Skaggs' discussion of doubleness in Porter's story and Cather's novel is particularly of interest.

Dissertations

In chapters that "focus on the connections among war, human relationships, and language," Ellen Bonds, in "Imagining War and Peace: American Women's Short World War II Fiction," DAI 57.5 (1996): AAG9629349, completed at Lehigh University, discusses Porter in the context of other women writers, such as Shirley Jackson, Ann Petry, and Kay Boyle, whose short fiction reflects on the complexities of war.

Deborah Nahamah Cohn, in "The Burden of the Past: Visions and Revisions of History in Latin America and the United States South," DAI 57.9 (1996): AAG9704008, completed at Brown University, explores connections between Latin American fiction and fiction of the American South. Included in her discussion is a chapter drawing connections between Porter's Old Order stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, focussing on "the role of memory and storytelling in strengthening communal structures threatened with disintegration by the changing of orders." Other writers discussed in the dissertation include Isabel Allende, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, and Mario Vargas Llosa.

Writers discussed in Kristina Kaye Groover's dissertation, "The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest," DAI 57.10 (1996): AAG9708128, completed at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, include, in addition to Porter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriett Arnow, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Kaye Gibbons. Applying feminist psychology and theology, Groover points to the ways that these writers reject the traditional pattern of the spiritual quest and offer "alternative constructions of spirituality" that locate spirituality "in community, rather than in solitude."

A surprising aim of Ellen Rachel Lansky's dissertation, "Something for the Lady: Women Alcoholics and Their Partners in American Modern Fiction," DAI 57.6 (1996): AAG9635872, completed at University of Minnesota, is "restoring the woman alcoholic--as author and character--to the canon." Lansky's series of intertextual readings include a reading of Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde" and Porter's Ship of Fools. Lansky argues that the texts she explores "are complicated by two constructions: the gendering of alcoholism and codependency and the authors' construction of codependent readers." Lansky applies the idea of "the resistant reader" to her study of alcoholism in literature, arguing that the authors she discusses place the reader in the position of "drinking partner" or "enabler," a position the reader should resist.

1997

Books/Collections

Darlene Unrue's Critical Essays on Katherine Anne Porter (G.K. Hall), in James Nagel's Critical Essays on American Literature series, follows the series' format, including previously published reviews of the fiction and non-fiction and new and previously published essays on the fiction and non-fiction. Although a number of the essays Unrue includes can be found in other collections of Porter scholarship, welcome additions to collected essays on Porter include Suzanne Jones' "Reading the Endings in Katherine Anne Porter's 'Old Mortality'" and Debra Moddelmog's "Concepts of Justice in the Work of Katherine Anne Porter." Porter scholars will wish to take note of two interesting new essays written for the volume: Unrue's "Katherine Anne Porter and Sigmund Freud" and Beth Alvarez's "'Royalty in Exile': Pre-Hispanic Art and Ritual in 'Maria Concepcion.'" Unrue's introduction is particularly valuable for its review of Porter scholarship published after 1988 and thus not included in Katherine Anne Porter: An Annotated Bibliography (1990), by Kathryn Hilt and Beth Alvarez.

Articles

Rae M. Carlton Colley's "Class and Sexuality in a Mexican Landscape: Katherine Anne Porter's Marginalia on D.H. Lawrence" is included in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, published by University of Georgia Press and edited by Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Colley's analysis of Porter's marginalia on D. H. Lawrence reveals that Porter considered Lawrence hampered as a writer by his "inability to separate social class from sexuality," which resulted in his failure to create a sense of order in his works. Colley's essay includes not only a detailed discussion of Porter's marginalia on Lawrence, but also a useful summary of the various categories of notes that make up Porter's marginalia in general.

Glenda Lindsey-Hicks' "The World of Word, Line, and Labyrinth in Katherine Anne Porter's 'Flowering Judas'" is included in Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story, published by Mellen Press and edited by Noel Harold Kaylor, Jr., a volume not likely to make its way to many scholars' bookshelves due to its exorbitant price ($120.00). Using J. Hillis Miller's narrative theory, Lindsey-Hicks emphasizes the maze-like plot of "Flowering Judas" and points to the etymology of words and names in the story as evidence of the story's imagery of webs, nets, mazes, and lines. The article is labyrinthine in its own way, and readers may have trouble following the line of Lindsey-Hicks' argument, made difficult by the essay's style and structure (much of the essay is comprised of numerous one- or two-sentence paragraphs that fail to develop a coherent argument). The essay is worth reading for its theoretical approach and for its provocative, if not always convincing deconstruction of words and names in the story.

Janis Stout, in "Behind 'Reflections on Willa Cather': Katherine Anne Porter and the Dilemmas of Literary Sisterhood," Legacy 14.2 (1997): 110-22, offers a thorough review of Porter's various revisions and early versions of her essay on Willa Cather found in Collected Essays and of her marginalia in books by and about Cather. Extending the argument she made previously in "Katherine Anne Porter's 'Reflections on Willa Cather': A Duplicitous Homage," American Literature 66 (1994): 719-35, Stout provides convincing evidence of the insights available to Porter scholars who mine the rich resource of the Porter Papers at McKeldin Library.

Dissertations

Stacie Lynn Hankinson in her dissertation, completed at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, "Politics, Pacifism, and Feminist Liberation in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter," DAI 58.5 (1997): AAG9733781, argues that like her accounts of her life, Porter's disavowal of feminism cannot be trusted. According to Hankinson, "[C]ontextualizing Porter within a feminist framework enables her pacifism to be viewed in newer and richer ways."

Tamara Horn's dissertation, completed at University of Alabama, "To Grandmother's House We Go: Modern Grandmother Archetypes in Works by Porter, Hurston, McCarthy, O'Connor, and Olsen," DAI 58.7 (1997): AAG9735713, groups Porter with other writers who explore "the power of the Victorian True Woman in spite of modern strides in women's rights." The dissertation includes analysis of the grandmother figures in "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall," "The Old Order," and "Old Mortality," who, according to Horn, "use domestic arts as vehicles for communication."

Rhonda Ann Morris' dissertation, completed at University of Florida, "Authoring Bodies: White Southern Women's Writing, 1920-1940," DAI 59.2 (1997): AAG9824121, offers connections between Porter and other white southern women writers, including Evelyn Scott, Frances Newman, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Morris focuses on the writers' various explorations of the South's "social regulation of female corporeality." According to Morris, "Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories critique the social order by exposing the mangled bodies that Porter sees at the heart of every domestic story. But Porter's depictions of Miranda Gay's continual flight suggest that women can avoid re-enacting the deforming stories of their mothers."

Although not indexed, of course, by MLA, Texas Monthly did a fine job in 1997 of bringing well-deserved attention to Porter. In January it published Porter's recipe for Mole Poblana, with a brief introduction by Patricia Sharpe, and in May Don Graham's essay "Katherine the Great," which offered the many readers of Texas Monthly a lively introduction to this most important of Texas writers.