Skip to Main Content
 

Global Search Box

 
 
 
 

Files

File List


Jaskunas_1994_english.pdf (23.19 MB)

ETD Abstract Container

Abstract Header

Faith and Banishment : the Artistic Credo of Katherine Anne Porter

Jaskunas, Paul Richard
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1406035076

Abstract Details

1994, BA, Oberlin College, English.
In 1932 Katherine Anne Porter wrote to her brother from Paris, where she was living happily, about walking along the Quay and buying old maps of the New World: "I have already a French map of America made in 1631, and a French map of Virginia dated 1640. They are beautiful and inaccurate and I mean to have a lot of them." (Letters of Katherine Anne Porter, 78) The image of the old, absolute map floated right off the page as I read; it seemed to serve as the perfect metaphor for something in Porter's fiction that I had not yet been able to describe metaphorically: the determined and inspired impulse to create order that mediates the fearful space between the reality of New Worlds and the perception of the individual. The role of the artist, as defined in Porter's fiction and nonfiction, is akin to that of the map maker who, working from her unique vantage point and from the vision of those preceding her, re-draws the boundaries, reshapes the landscape of individual consciousness. Each generation of artists, she believed, must not intentionally speak for a new age of understanding or the latest ultimate truths. Rather, the artist stands alone, necessarily a voice of dissent, creating a self-defined order in the context of communal pressure and the stream of time. Her writing articulates a steadfast sense of her mission as an artist and it is this mission I want to explain. Her letters and essays discuss it in straightforward terms, while the artistic ramifications of her credo are given the movement of narrative in the mythical initiations from innocence to experience which so often form the nexus of her stories.
Dewey Ganzel (Advisor)
42 p.
Literature
Katherine Anne Porter

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jaskunas, P. R. (1994). Faith and Banishment : the Artistic Credo of Katherine Anne Porter [Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1406035076

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jaskunas, Paul. Faith and Banishment : the Artistic Credo of Katherine Anne Porter. 1994. Oberlin College, Undergraduate thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1406035076.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jaskunas, Paul. "Faith and Banishment : the Artistic Credo of Katherine Anne Porter." Undergraduate thesis, Oberlin College, 1994. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1406035076

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

oberlin1406035076
262
© 1994, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Oberlin College Honors Theses and OhioLINK.