The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Mary Titus
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter

The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Mary Titus
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820341142
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
During a life that spanned ninety years, Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) witnessed dramatic and intensely debated changes in the gender roles of American women. Mary Titus draws upon unpublished Porter papers, as well as newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews, to trace Porter’s shifting and complex response to those cultural changes. Titus shows how Porter explored her own ambivalence about gender and creativity, for she experienced firsthand a remarkable range of ideas concerning female sexuality. These included the Victorian attitudes of the grandmother who raised her; the sexual license of revolutionary Mexico, 1920s New York, and 1930s Paris; and the conservative, ordered attitudes of the Agrarians. Throughout Porter’s long career, writes Titus, she “repeatedly probed cultural arguments about female creativity, a woman’s maternal legacy, romantic love, and sexual identity, always with startling acuity, and often with painful ambivalence.” Much of her writing, then, serves as a medium for what Titus terms Porter’s “gender-thinking”--her sustained examination of the interrelated issues of art, gender, and identity. Porter, says Titus, rebelled against her upbringing yet never relinquished the belief that her work as an artist was somehow unnatural, a turn away from the essential identity of woman as “the repository of life,” as childbearer. In her life Porter increasingly played a highly feminized public role as southern lady, but in her writing she continued to engage changing representations of female identity and sexuality. This is an important new study of the tensions and ambivalence inscribed in Porter’s fiction, as well as the vocational anxiety and gender performance of her actual life.

Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection

Katherine Anne Porter & the Art of Rejection PDF Author: William L. Nance
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
In the first book-length study of Porter's work, Nance defines a central thematic pattern--a principle of rejection--that unifies her fiction. This study is largely devoted to the explication of this theme in the individual works, though necessarily it reaches beyond this theme and into a general consideration of Porter's literary career and biography. Originally published in 1964. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Katherine Anne Porter

Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Katherine Anne Porter
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878052660
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter

Selected Letters of Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1626744475
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) produced a relatively small body of fiction, but she wrote thousands and thousands of letters. The present selection of 135 unexpurgated letters, written to seventy-four different persons, begins with a 1916 letter written from a tuberculosis sanatorium in Texas and ends with a 1979 letter dictated to an unnamed nursing-home attendant in Maryland. Different from any previous selection, this body of letters does not omit Porter’s frank criticism of fellow writers and spans her entire life. Within that circumscription is the chronicle of Porter, a twentieth-century woman searching for love while she struggles to become the writer she is sure she can be. Porter’s letters vividly showcase the twentieth century as the writer observes it from her historical vantage points—tuberculosis sanatoria and the influenza pandemic of 1918; the leftist community in Greenwich Village in the 1920s; the Mexican cultural revolution of the 1920s and early 1930s; the expatriate community in Paris in the 1930s; the rise of Nazism in Europe between the World Wars; the Second World War and its concomitant suppression of civil liberties; Hollywood and the university circuit as a haven for financially strapped writers in the 1940s and 1950s; the Cold War and its competition for supremacy in space; the Women’s Rights and the Civil Rights movements; and the evolution and demise of literary modernism.

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction

Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction PDF Author: Darlene Harbour Unrue
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333549
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
My stories are fragments of a larger plan, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote. And on another occasion she praised a critic who perceived that all her work, from the very beginning, was part of an "unbroken progression, all related." In Truth and Vision in Katherine Anne Porter's Fiction, Darlene Unrue examines the encompassing themes that underlie Porter's shorter fiction and that combined to create the haunting events of her complex metaphorical novel, Ship of Fools. Porter believed that men and women are compelled toward discovering the truth about their existence, but that the nature of our world makes those truths difficult to discern. In her writing, Unrue finds, Porter explored not only this basic human need to confront the truth, but also the bewilderment and suffering that are so often the results of failing to fulfill that need. Often in Porter's fiction the movement toward truth is obstructed by the hollow beliefs and illusions that abound in the world--by the seductions of ideology and dogmatic religion, by romantic love or the vision of a golden past. Clinging to such illusions, using them to lend a false coherence to their lives, Porter's characters are led away from the hard realization that truth requires accepting the existence of the unknowable at the center of life, and that what is knowable lies within themselves. Drawing on essays, reviews, letters, and notes, as well as on the intricate fabric of the fiction, this study traces Porter's pursuit of the truth through the creation of a body of fiction in which, from fragments of life, she could assemble an honest vision of the world.

Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools

Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools PDF Author: Thomas Austenfeld
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 157441593X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Containing pieces by distinguished scholars including Darlene Harbour Unrue and Robert Brinkmeyer, this book is the first full investigation of the links between Porter's only novel and European intellectual history. Beginning with Sebastian Brant, author of the late medieval Narrenschiff, whom she acknowledges in her Preface to Ship of Fools, Porter's image of Europe emerges as more complex, more knowledgeable, and more politically nuanced than previous critics of her novel have acknowledged. Ship of Fools is in conversation with Europe's humanistic tradition as well as with the political moments of 1931 and 1962; i.e., the years that elapsed from the novel's conception to its completion. The novel and the 1965 film based upon it intervene into the history of film, the assessment of Weimar Germany, and Porter's clear-eyed judgment of her own times through the lens of her art.

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings

Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings PDF Author: Katherine Anne Porter
Publisher: Library of America
ISBN: 1598533274
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 1100

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Book Description
Eudora Welty said that Katherine Anne Porter ?writes stories with a power that stamps them to their very last detail on the memory.? Set in her native Texas and her beloved Mexico, prewar Nazi Germany and the gothic Old South, they are stories of love, outrage, betrayal, and spiritual reckoning that are severe but never cruel, and always exquisitely precise. They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, ?many are unsurpassed in modern fiction,? and when gathered in one volume in 1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter?s long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography.

Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter

Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter PDF Author: Katherine Anne Porter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume brings together 29 pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appear in her collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Includes both fiction and essays.

Artistic Ambivalence in Clay

Artistic Ambivalence in Clay PDF Author: Courtney Lee Weida
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443830216
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
This book is a collection of glimpses into the lives and works of fifteen prominent women artists in contemporary ceramics. Spanning multiple genres, generations, and geographies, these potters and ceramic sculptors describe nuances, contradictions, and tensions surrounding their artworks, artistic processes, and professional lives. Within this text, artistic ambivalences are questioned and analyzed in terms of myriad gender issues. Featured ceramicists include: Maureen Burns-Bowie, Esta Carnahan, Ellen Day, Cara Gay Driscoll, Dolores Dunning, Heidi Fahrenbacher, DeBorah Goletz, Lynn Goodman, Joan Hardin, Beth Heit, Tsehai Johnson, Kate Malone, Norma Messing, Elspeth Owen, and Mary Trainor. The qualitative research summarized within this book draws influence from feminist methodologies and the visual arts methodology of portraiture. Artists, art historians, and art educators interested in ceramics and gender will find detailed discussion of unexpected persistence of gendered associations within ceramic technology, social binaries of gender identity in symbols and traditions of clay, and subtle sexism surrounding ceramics in education. At the same time, this text celebrates women’s work in ceramics as an often neglected set of perspectives, highlighting the intricate complexities of artistic ambivalences and lived experiences of art within a dynamic dialogue.

Katherine Anne Porter and Texas

Katherine Anne Porter and Texas PDF Author: Clinton Machann
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9780890964415
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
"A Texas bibliography of Katherine Anne Porter" : p. [124]-182.