| Summary: | Eudora Welty's full stature in world literature is not
clear because her canon has not yet been seen as unified by an
advertent thematic structure. This oversight stems in part
from the fact that critics, seeing her regional detail as an
end rather than a means, neglected Lewis Simpson's insistence
that Welty is a modernist writer working, like Faulkner, in
the tradition of Proust, Joyce, and Eliot. By applying a
modernist paradigm to several major volumes of her fiction, I
have traced consistent, discernible patterns that can be
communicated in classrooms as well as in scholarly
discussions. Welty focuses primarily on major transitional
eras in national history that particularly illustrate the
inevitable disintegration of familiar cultures. Partly by
employing Bakhtin's concept of chronotopes, I show that each
era she portrays is systematically intersected by parallel
cultures of other eras and locales, evoked by allusions to
masterpieces of past art works, to historical similarities,
and to myths that gave meaning to human life in times of
shared belief. The juxtapositions of different cultures
comment on a crucial, universal challenge for all humans:
to accept time's mutability without evasion or retreat. The
fragments of art form a unifying collage, reminding readers of
art's importance in sustaining human life by providing codes
for emotional and spiritual survival of change. Welty's final
work affirms that humanity can put the details of temporal existence into an emotionally liberating perspective by
recognizing the constant and reassuring cyclic patterns of the
natural world, for these patterns can be held in memory and
preserved in art. === Arts, Faculty of === English, Department of === Graduate
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