SOURCE: “Literary Criticism, Katherine Anne Porter's Consciousness, and the Silver Dove,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 109–15.

In the following essay, Cheatham argues against an antiformalist approach to Porter's fiction.

I recently received a rejection notice for a paper I've written on Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, arguing that religious images suggest the Christian myth of fall and redemption which the story affirms and Miranda seems to accept.¹ Along with other comments from the rejecting referee came this one: “Porter is an existentialist, an atheist one at that, not a Christian.” From the brevity of his response I don't know how the referee arrived at such an assessment, but he has raised for me some interesting questions about poststructuralist critical methodology, questions about the nature of text and textuality, about formalism and antiformalism.

My rejected paper follows generally formalist methodology. It is a...