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.

Provides in-depth analysis of the life, works, career, and critical importance of Katherine Anne Porter.

A novel recounting the lives and actions of the passengers on a ship en route from Mexico to Germany in 1931.

The goal of this book is to formulate a modern theoretical approach for rhetorical studies in a variety of disciplines in the humanities, media research, and other cultural studies. The discipline of rhetoric originally concerned itself with linguistic forms of communication, and its basic theory was developed with such cases in mind. With respect to this ancient tradition, there are numerous books that provide a historical overview of the field. There is also a wide array of introductory works and research contributions that deal with the practice of political rhetoric. On the other hand, only a few 20th century academics have attempted to theoretically rehabilitate rhetoric (after its decline as an academic discipline in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries) and to give rhetorical theory a modern, new, and further reaching perspective. Two notable examples have been Kenneth Burke and Brian Vickers. The book begins with the assumption that rhetoric is not merely limited to linguistic action, but rather is present everywhere in the communicative world. Against this background, this work develops a modern theory of rhetoric, and demonstrates in twelve chapters how methodical rhetorical analysis can be done in selected practical fields of application (Literature, Music, Images, and Film).

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.

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.