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Very little scholarship on Katherine Anne Porter was published in the year 2000; however, looking ahead, I suspect next year's review of 2001 scholarship will make up in length for the shortness of this year's review. Including an essay published in 1999, three of the scholarly articles and essays discussed below focus on Hacienda, making 1999/2000 a banner period for scholarship on it. Interest in Hacienda comes from a variety of quarters, including film studies and textual studies, reminding us again of Porter's importance as a cultural observer and artistic innovator. Readers interested in Olivier Debroise's Un Banquete en Tetlapayac, mentioned below, can find more information at http://primercuadro.com.mx/tetlapayac.html. I begin with two book essays from 1999 that were not included in last year's newsletter.

1999 Articles and Essays

Joseph J. and John C. Waldmeir include William L. Nance's "Variations on a Dream: Katherine Anne Porter and Truman Capote" (originally published in Southern Humanities Review in 1969) in The Critical Response to Truman Capote, published by Greenwood Press. According to Nance, Truman Capote and Porter (both dreamers and, as Southerners, outsiders) in their fiction communicate a particularly American sensitivity to limitations and portray the "wandering dreamer pursued by death." Nance points to the fleeting vision of an unattainable paradise in Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" and argues that Porter's "short-circuited" sense of life's possibilities and resignation to the world's imperfections result in "something fixed and final" in her work. In contrast, Capote's career is marked by change. Nance surveys Capote's body of work, highlighting the ways the dreamer in Capote's fiction changes form, at times tirelessly pursuing the dream and at times "go[ing] about the business of accommodating to this imperfect world."

Susan Swartwout's "Revolution Has Not Yet Entered Their Souls: The Jilting of Katherine Anne Porter," in Value and Vision in American Literature: Literary Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White, edited by Joseph Candido and published by Ohio University Press, takes its title from Porter's Mexican essay "Leaving the Petate," the "souls" in the title referring to the souls of the Mexican people. Porter's observation about the revolution's failure to take hold is applied to a reading of the two versions of Hacienda, which Swartwout compares and contrasts, noting the characters' transformation in the second version. The changes in characters reflect Porter's experience of betrayal, or "jilting," as she witnessed "decay and corruption throughout Mexico." Particularly significant for Swartwout is the change in Porter's Mexican Indians in Hacienda, who are portrayed in the second version as complicit in their oppression.

2000 Books

None

Articles and Essays

Elena Feder, in "A Banquet at Tetlapayac," West Coast Line 34.2 (2000): 28-42, studies Porter's Hacienda from the perspective of a film historian. She explores Porter's interest in filmmaking and cinematic technique and her influence on Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and his film Que Viva México! She also discusses Olivier Debroise's recent experimental film Un Banquete en Tetlapayac, which tells the story of Eisenstein's movie and features a large cast of characters, including Porter (played by art historian Sally Stein).

Robert Mellin, in "Unreeled: A History of Katherine Anne Porter's Filmic Text, Hacienda," Mosaic 33.2 (2000): 47-66, studies the 1934 Harrison of Paris version of Hacienda and later mass-trade editions, arguing that the mass-trade editions deprive readers of the complete experience of the text as a filmic text. Porter and Monroe Wheeler, the Harrison of Paris typographer and co-owner, used pagination, choice of type, and space to communicate the filmic nature of the text, particularly suggesting, through bibliographical signifiers, the film technique of montage. According to this in-depth and interesting study, the timing of their fine press endeavor was poor: many critics in 1934 considered the Harrison of Paris edition elitist, and modern printing practices were quickly and decisively turning away from book craftsmanship and toward mass production.

A helpful new resource for teachers and scholars of modern American literature, American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion and published by Greenwood Press, includes, among its many essays on individual American women writers, Lou Halsell Rodenberger's "Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)." Rodenberger reviews Porter's biography, major works and themes, and critical reception. The essay's bibliography includes a select list of studies of Porter.

Dissertations

Porter's Miranda and other modernist protagonists of the South struggle to understand their fathers, writes Molly Boyd, in "Our Father's Footsteps: Family Myths and the Southern Heroic Tradition," DAI 61.04A (2000): AAI9969475, completed at University of South Carolina. Their freedom from the "old order" of their fathers comes at a heavy psychological cost, and Boyd reviews the manifestations of this cost in the characters' lives. Other protagonists discussed include Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Bayard Sartoris, and Isaac McCaslin; Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Will Barrett; and Eudora Welty's Laurel Hand.

Porter's "The Circus" is far from an isolated example of Southern fiction that exploits the circus metaphor, one learns from Patricia Bradley's "The Three-Ring Self: Robert Penn Warren's Circus Aesthetic and Southern Intertextuality," DAI 61.11A (2000): AAI9996333, completed at University of Tennessee. Bradley's primary text is the 1947 novella The Circus in the Attic, by Robert Penn Warren. However, she places the novella in the context of works by Porter, Thomas Wolfe, and Eudora Welty, all of whom, like Warren, lived through the heyday of the American circus, the beginning of the twentieth century. Bradley's research on the American circus-its history, changing role in American life, and increasing conservatism-provides a useful background for readers of Porter's short story.

Henri Bergson's concept of time as pure duration and I. A. Richards's and Michel Foucalt's explorations of rhetoric as a way of knowing inform Melinda McBee's "The Canon of Memory and Rhetoric as a Way of Knowing in Selected Miranda Stories of Katherine Anne Porter," DAI 61.09A (2000): AAI9988396, completed at Texas Woman's University. McBee encourages readers of the Miranda stories to recognize Porter's use of memory in the stories as a creative strategy and a rhetorical strategy. Silence, too, is a rhetorical strategy operating in the stories, McBee argues.

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.