7 Katherine Anne Porter课件.pptVIP

Katherine Anne PorterStream of Consciousness Hao Guilian, Ph.D. Yunnan Normal University Spring, 2011 Katherine Anne Porter (1890 – 1980) American novelist and short-story writer, a master stylist whose long short stories have a richness of texture and complexity of character delineation usually achieved only in the novel. I shall try to tell the truth, but the result will be fiction. Known as a writer of great clarity, Porter achieved a style of objectivity without sacrificing sensitivity. Her stories are self-motivated, without the authors omnipresence. She has been called a maker of darkish parables for her treatment of individuals who are impoverished by the modern environment and also for her use of the themes of guilt, isolation, and spiritual denial. Many of her stories use the geographic locales of the South, the Southwest, and Mexico. Porter was raised by her father and paternal grandmother, Catharine Ann Skaggs Porter, a stern disciplinarian, whose reminiscences of the Civil War and tales of her familys past were Porters first introduction to the art of storytelling. She died when Porter was eleven, but her strong character provided a model for grandmothers in her stories. She worked as a newspaperwoman in Chicago and in Denver, Colorado, before leaving in 1920 for Mexico, the scene of several of her stories. Her novel Ship of Fools (《愚人船》)was published in 1962. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter appeared in 1965, winning the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Porter’s quote: “For this vocation [writing] I was and am willing to live and die, and I consider very few other things of the slightest importance.” “My whole attempt has been to discover and understand human motives, human feeling, to make a distillation of what human relations and experiences my mind has been able to absorb. I have never known an uninteresting human being, and I have never known two alike; there are broad classifications and deep similarities, but