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Articles in journals and essays in collections continued to be the most popular form of scholarship on Katherine Anne Porter in 1999. I found no book-length studies of Porter listed in the MLA Bibliography for 1999. Articles and essays on Porter in 1999 defy easy categorization. However, Porter's connections to other writers; her relationship to region; her insight into women's lives; and her profound impact on those who knew her, loved her, and wrote about her were subjects of work published about her in 1999. I begin by supplementing last year's essay on Porter scholarship in 1998.

1998

Chapters in Books

Jan Nordby Gretlund's essays on Southern literature are collected in Frames of Southern Mind: Reflections on the Stoic, Bi-Racial and Existential South, published by Odense University Press. Chapters on Porter include "Katherine Anne Porter and the Old South" and "The Man in the Tree: Katherine Anne Porter's Lynching Story."

Dissertations

Mary Virginia Brackett, in "The Contingent Self: An Ideology of the Personal," DAI 59.05A (1998): AAG9833830, completed at University of Kansas, uses postmodern and feminist theory to critique traditional academic writing. Practicing personal literary criticism, the author discusses various writers, including Porter, and explores the formation of self-concept in their writings.

1999

Articles and Essays

According to Susana Jiménez-Placer, in "Motherhood as Conflict in Katherine Anne Porter's Short Fiction," Short Story 7.2 (1999): 77-90, "Katherine Anne Porter's personal experience as motherless girl and childless woman made her feelings about motherhood complex."

Jim énez-Placer develops a category of female characters in Porter's stories that she refers to as "childless mothers," including Mar ía Concepción, the Grandmother in "The Old Order," and Rosaleen in "The Cracked Looking-Glass." Jiménez-Placer points out the significance of breastfeeding as an action symbolizing the resolution of conflicts about motherhood in Porter's stories.

Gail L. Mortimer refers to a number of Porter's stories in "Initiation Stories and Gender," in Analyzing the Different Voice: Feminist Psychological Theory and Literary Texts, edited by Ellen S. Silber and published by Rowman and Littlefield. Mortimer uses stories by William Faulkner, Porter, and Eudora Welty to support her argument that the clean breaks from family and other connections with which male authors have concluded many of their male initiation stories are not achieved in the female initiation stories that women write. According to Mortimer, Porter's characters powerfully exemplify the difficulty in separation that [Nancy] Chodorow and [Carol] Gilligan see as so typical of female experience.

As her title suggests, Mary Ann Wimsatt, in "The Old Order Undermined: Daughters, Mothers, and Grandmothers in Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda Tales," in Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women's Writing, edited by Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff and published by Louisiana State University Press, takes a generational approach to reading Porter's Miranda stories. In the Miranda stories, "Porter depicts women—whether daughters, mothers, or grandmothers—bravely contending with the inevitable uncertainties of existence while attempting to undermine the rigid old order that forms the chief obstacle to personal freedom in their lives."

Writing from the perspective of a public high school teacher, Ralph M. Cline, in "Aging and the Public Schools: Visits of Charity: The Young Look at the Old," in Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Lagretta Tallent Lenker and published by Praeger Press, discusses short stories about the aging frequently found in high school American literature textbooks. Of the stories he discusses, Eudora Welty's "A Worn Path" and Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" are singled out for praise because they "provide portrait[s] of dignity with great age." Thomas Austenfeld, in "Thomas Wolfe and Katherine Anne Porter in Germany: The Ethical Dimension of Fiction" The Thomas Wolfe Review 23.1 (1999): 11-19, finds connections between Wolfe's and Porter's responses to the political situation in Germany in the 1930s. Neither Wolfe nor Porter, according to Austenfeld, "[came] to Germany to study fascism. Rather, they encountered it somewhat to their surprise, were dumbfounded at first, and then started responding with the professional means at their disposal: they wrote." Their experiences in Germany aided both writers in the development of the ethical dimensions of their writing.

Janis P. Stout's experience as a biographer and understanding of theories of biography inform the essay "On the Pitfalls of Literary Biography: The Case of Joan Givner and Katherine Anne Porter," The Southern Quarterly 37.3-4 (1999): 129-138. Givner's "infatuation and identification" with her biographical subject illustrate the particular pitfalls awaiting the literary biographer. Awareness of these pitfalls may allow the biographer to avoid them. Stout's essay provides a balanced and thoughtful overview of the controversies surrounding Givner's biography of Porter.

Although listed as a 1997 article, Stout's "Katherine Anne Porter's 'The Old Order': Writing in the Borderlands," Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 493-505, was published more recently. Grounding her argument in ideas presented in Gloria Anzald úa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Stout claims Porter as a "borderlands" writer whose "imagination was one of doubleness and crossing." Stout emphasizes the South-to-Southwest movement in the "Old Order" stories, a movement that serves as the "spacial equivalent" of the temporal movement of the stories, "from past to present to future." Recognizing Porter as a "borderlands" writer allows readers to appreciate the centrality of Porter's work in Southwestern literature.

Porter scholars will not want to miss Jane DeMouy's personal essay, "Elegy for Katherine Anne," Virginia Quarterly Review 75.3 (1999): 504-510. DeMouy visited Porter many times during the last two years of her life, and in this moving essay, she recounts, through journal entries, her visits during Porter's last months and her final visit on September 15, 1980, when she witnessed her death.

Dissertations

Karen Lynn Weathermon, in "Inside/outside: Framing Katherine Anne Porter=s Creative Tensions," DAI 60.11A (1999): AAI9949951, completed at Washington State University, uses feminist film theory and, particularly, the concept of the "gaze" to explore the tensions in Porter's work and life between conventions and individuals and appearances and identity.

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.