Newsletter of the

Society

Inside...

Other Newsletters

Return to home page

Although, according to the MLA Bibliography, no books or dissertations on Katherine Anne Porter were published in 1998, articles in journals and essays in books were plentiful. A trend evident in works published on Porter in 1997, intertextual readings of Porter, continued in 1998. In 1998 Porter's work was compared to the works of writers as diverse as María Cristina Mena, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, Juan Rulfo, and Dorothy Parker. Additionally, her roles as mentor to Texas writer William Humphrey and competitor to another Texas writer, J. Frank Dobie, were considered. Articles on Porter in 1998 are notable for their various theoretical approaches. Scholars used the theories of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin to gain fresh insights into Porter's work.

Books/Collections/Special Issues

No books were published on Porter in 1998. However, a special issue of Southwestern American Literature [24.1 (1998)] based on a symposium at Southwest Texas State University on May 15, 1998, featured thirteen articles on Porter. For an extended discussion of the symposium, readers should see Mark Busby's article in last year's newsletter. The articles in the special issue include the following: "Writing Home: Katherine Anne Porter, Coming and Going," by Janis Stout; "Katherine Anne Porter's Birthdays," by Darlene Unrue; "Katherine Anne Porter and the University of Texas: A Map of Misunderstanding," by Richard Holland; "Troubled Innocent Abroad: Katherine Anne Porter's Colonial Adventure," by Jeraldine R. Kraver; "Gender and Creativity in Katherine Anne Porter's 'The Princess,'" by Christine Hait; "Trapped by the Great White Searchlight: Katherine Anne Porter and Marital Bliss," by Larry Herold; "Porter and Dobie: The Marriage from Hell," by James Ward Lee; "The Prodigal Daughter Comes Home," by Lou Rodenberger; "Katherine Anne Porter and Texas: Ambivalence Deep as the Bone," by Mark Busby; "Knowing Nature in Katherine Anne Porter's Short Fiction," by Terrell F. Dixon; "A 'taste for the exotic': Revolutionary Mexico and the Short Stories of Katherine Anne Porter and María Cristina Mena," by Rob Johnson; "Katherine Anne Porter and William Humphrey: A Mentorship Reconsidered," by Bert Almon; and "Memories that Never Were: Katherine Anne Porter and the Family Saga," by Sylvia Grider.

Articles and Essays in Books

Deborah Cohn, in "Paradise Lost and Regained: The Old Order and Memory in Katherine Anne Porter's Stories and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo," Hispanofila 124 (Sept. 1998): 65-86, finds parallels between Southern and Mexican experiences of social upheaval as depicted in the Miranda stories and Juan Rulfo's novel Pedro Páramo. Additionally, she compares the war settings of the novel and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and explores the emphasis on distortions of the truth and consolidation of power that the works share. Finally, Cohn argues that the role of memory in "keeping the past alive well beyond its time, making it responsible for condemning the present to death, is a prominent concern for Porter and Rulfo."

William V. Davis's "'The Native Land of My Heart': Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Stories" is included in Literature of Region and Nation: Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference, 2-7 August 1996, published by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, with University of New Brunswick in Saint John, and edited by Winnifred M. Bogaards. Although Davis covers familiar territory-the significance of memory to Porter's artistry, the function of dreams in her fiction, the sequential nature of the Miranda stories-his clear prose offers readers an opportunity to appreciate anew the process by which Porter produced her art. "The Grave," Davis points out, provides a frame for the two sequences of Miranda stories, the two longer stories and the series of shorter ones, and all of her stories provide "an exploration of an epistemological obsession that goes beyond both place and time."

What do Amy in "Old Mortality," the title character of "He," Mr. Helton in "Noon Wine," and Ottilie in "Holiday" have in common? According to M. K. Fornataro-Neil, in "Constructed Narratives and Writing Identity in the Fiction of Katherine Anne Porter" Twentieth Century Literature 44.3 (1998): 349-61, all four characters "cannot speak for themselves [and] are destined to be written by others." Miranda's family writes Amy, Mrs. Whipple writes He, the Thompsons write Mr. Helton, and the Müller family writes Ottilie. Porter's silent characters, according to Fornataro-Neil, "allow her a greater opportunity to comment on the construction of identity and to critique the notion of objective truth." Although Porter's silent characters have been studied elsewhere, Fornataro-Neil offers an interesting grouping of these characters. One of Fornataro-Neil's most thought-provoking arguments is that "Mrs. Whipple has done such a good job of defining or writing [the] identity of [He]. . . that even the critics are fooled." Fornataro-Neil encourages readers to question Mrs. Whipple's narrative concerning the extent of His impairment.

Jeraldine Kraver, in "Laughing Best: Competing Correlatives in the Art of Katherine Anne Porter and Diego Rivera," South Atlantic Review 63.2 (1998): 48-74, asserts that the "discourse of post-colonialism offers a compelling insight into Porter's expatriate experience," and her essay demonstrates her assertion. The work of Edward Said particularly informs Kraver's argument that "Porter ultimately approached Mexico with a colonial mindset." Kraver characterizes Porter's attacks on Diego Rivera in fiction, letters, and interviews as often misguided and unfair. Rivera, however, may have had "the last laugh," Kraver argues. She points out that a character in "Folklore and Tourist Mexico," a panel in Rivera's Hotel Reforma mural offering "a satiric depiction of the superficial and destructive character of foreigners in Mexico," bears a striking resemblance to Porter.

Ellen Lansky's intertextual reading of Dorothy Parker's "Big Blonde" and Porter's Ship of Fools in "Female Trouble: Dorothy Parker, Katherine Anne Porter, and Alcoholism," Literature and Medicine 17.2 (1998): 213-30, "brings together the authors and their fiction over a common complex: alcoholism and the 'female troubles' that they encounter as they try to negotiate a life for themselves in a culture that asks them, as heterosexual women, to subordinate their bodies, desires, and aspirations to their male partners." Lansky uses Michel Foucault's concept of the Panopticon to explore the ways that the transgressing female drinkers in the story and novel "become adjusted to being watched" by male partners and then "internalize the panoptic gaze" and watch themselves. Lansky's analysis of Mrs. Treadwell in Ship of Fools is fascinating, but readers may take issue with the close parallels Lansky finds between Porter's and Parker's lives, and particularly between their problems with alcohol and the impact it had on their later lives.

Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "the carnivalesque" operates as the theoretical framework of Janis Stout's "Katherine Anne Porter and Mark Twain at the Circus," Southern Quarterly 36.3 (1998): 113-23. A comparison of circus episodes in Huckleberry Finn and Porter's "The Circus" leads to further comparisons between the child figures at the centers of the two works, Miranda and Huck, and between the two authors, who, Stout points out, experienced similar tensions between their roles as artists and entertainers/performers. Stout documents Porter's long-standing fascination with Twain and attributes Porter's difficulty with a lecture she struggled to prepare on him in 1959 to her recognition that Twain's troubles and fears mirrored her own.

Darlene Unrue's "Losing Battles and Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools: The Commonality of Modernist Vision and Homeric Analogue" is included in The Late Novels of Eudora Welty, published by University of South Carolina Press and edited by Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp. E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Homer's epics are useful reference points for readers of Eudora Welty's Losing Battles and Porter's Ship of Fools, according to Unrue. The two writers, best known for their short fiction, shared with Forster and with each other a modernist vision of the novel, which included the "new use of traditional materials." Welty and Porter also shared a love of Homer's epics, but their different Homeric models-for Welty, the Iliad and for Porter, the Odyssey--"reveal the differences in their artistic visions."

Dissertations

None.

Although I was unable to obtain the article through interlibrary loan, I want to mention an article published in 1998 with a particularly intriguing title: E. W. Smith's "Thereby Hangs a Tale: Rope in the Hands of Plautus, Porter and Hitchcock," Arachne 5.1 (1998): 53-78.

Also, Beth Alvarez brought to my attention an article that has not been included in Porter bibliographies: Lakshmi Chandra's "Ship of Fools: The Novel as History," Indian Journal of American Studies 19.1 & 2 (1989): 15-18. Borrowing the phrase "The Novel as History" from Allen Tate, who used the term to draw a distinction between historical novels such as Gone with the Wind and novels that could be material for historians due to their authors' acute "consciousness of the past in the present," Chandra categorizes Ship of Fools as a novel that operates as history.

Please send information on any additions that need to be made to this essay to me at chrishait@colacoll.edu so that I may include the information in next year's essay.