Associate in Arts Program - Open Access Publications

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Open access publications by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in the Associate in Arts Program.

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    Looking for Kevin: A Rereading of Rosaleen O’Toole’s Journey in Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Cracked Looking-Glass”
    (The Explicator, 2025-01-13) Grogan, Christine
    In a 2024 interview, Darlene Harbour Unrue was asked what she discovered when researching Porter’s life for the 2005 biography that Joan Givner’s Citation1982 one had not unearthed. She replied, “well I found some extra husbands.” The additional two, albeit short-lived, marriages Unrue uncovered brings the total to five. Wed and divorced a whopping five times—no small feat, especially for a woman born in 1890—Porter unsurprisingly casts couples in troubled unions in a good bit of her fiction. One of her “strongest condemnations of romantic love,” as Mary Titus noted, is “The Cracked Looking-Glass,” a story that has not received nearly as much critical attention as Porter’s other works.Footnote1 The highly crafted, multi-layered tale drew inspiration from rumors Porter heard when summering in Merryall Valley, Connecticut, in 1926, about a rich Irish widow “who scandalized her rural neighbors by keeping young boys as boarders” (Unrue 138). When learning of these speculations, Porter herself was living with a man 11 years her junior—Ernest Stock, an English painter and former Royal Air Force pilot.Footnote2 Their relationship ended with the season. Unrue points out in her biography that Stock was but one in a “chain of liaisons with much younger men”—Eugene Dove Pressly, later Albert Erskine, among others (138). When “The Cracked Looking-Glass” was published, Porter had experienced firsthand the difficulties of being in a relationship with a significant age gap and yet she continued putting too much stock in affairs with younger men.
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    Kay Boyle and the “Jewel of Inconsistencies”
    (ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 2022-02-08) Grogan, Christine
    After Katherine Anne Porter declined the invitation, Kay Boyle taught a six-week summer course at the University of Delaware in 1957. It was her first academic job, awarded in part because of her success as a lecturer at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. The summer course at UD was designed to teach the history of the short story to teachers of English. Boyle wrote that she “desperately” needed the money ($2,000) but that she wasn’t too keen on the New Critical approach to analyzing literature that was in vogue (Spanier, Life in Letters 532). This formalist theory focused strictly on the text, neglecting the rich context that produced the work. What Boyle referred to as “this ghastly course at the University of Delaware” proved troublesome (Spanier, Life in Letters 530) – and it was not just because literary criticism tortured poor short stories, as Boyle worded it in a letter to Porter (Alvarez par. 7). Despite, or perhaps because of, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, racism was rampant in Delaware. This paper explores the context of her 1965 “One Sunny Morning,” Boyle’s story written about her time in Delaware, which markedly departs from her earlier ones about race. It argues that Boyle’s short time in the First State was instrumental in defining her views of black-white race relations and involvement in the fight for civil rights, serving as the basis for her only short story that offers an antidote to racism.
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