Eudora Welty: Sensing the Particular, Revealing the Universal in Her Southern World

Eudora Welty writes poetic prose that is painted with colors—red, rose, blue, green, silver, black, white, pearly gray, golden-yellow, rich in figurative language, and resplendent in sensory images and synaesthesia. Welty’s art illustrates an extraordinary sensitivity for discovering the South, in particular, but also the world at large. Examining how Welty’s observations lead to her senses of smell, touch, and sound in the stories “June Recital” and “Moon Lake,” selected letters and her comments on one of her photographs, and lastly, the stories “A Sketching Trip” and “The Demonstrators,” I argue that Welty pictures the invisible and writes the unsayable by her use of the senses with two results. First, she creates a sense of the South that is simultaneously particular and universal. To illustrate this, I analyze passages especially replete in visual and olfactory senses. Second, Welty’s sensory language gives meaning to the abstract, universal concepts such as joy, love, art, and fear.La prose poétique de Eudora Welty est peinte en couleurs—rouge, rose, bleu, vert, argent, noir, blanc, gris-perle, jaune doré ; riche en langue figurative, et resplendissante d’images sensorielles caractérisées par leur synesthésie. L'art de Welty démontre la sensibilité extraordinaire de l’auteur, sensibilité mise au service de la découverte du monde en général, et du Sud en particulier. A partir de l’étude des observations de Welty et de la manière dont celles-ci sont dominées par les sens de l'odorat, du toucher, et de l’ouïe dans les nouvelles “June Recital” et “Moon Lake,” dans une sélection de ses lettres et ses commentaires sur une de ses photographie et dans les histoires “A Sketching Trip” et “The Demonstrators”, je démontrerai que Welty dépeint l'invisible et écrit l’imprononçable à travers son emploi des sens, amenant à deux résultats. Tout d'abord, elle créée un paysage sensoriel du Sud qui est à la fois particulier et universel. De manière à illustrer ce phénomène, j’analyse dans mon travail des passages où les références à la vue et à l'odorat sont particulièrement abondantes. Ensuite, le langage sensoriel de Welty lui permet de donner du sens à des concepts universels et abstraits, tels que la joie, l’amour, l’art et la peur

Eudora Welty: Sensing the Particular, Revealing the Universal in Her Southern World

Eudora Welty writes poetic prose that is painted with colors—red, rose, blue, green, silver, black, white, pearly gray, golden-yellow, rich in figurative language, and resplendent in sensory images and synaesthesia. Welty’s art illustrates an extraordinary sensitivity for discovering the South, in particular, but also the world at large. Examining how Welty’s observations lead to her senses of smell, touch, and sound in the stories “June Recital” and “Moon Lake,” selected letters and her comments on one of her photographs, and lastly, the stories “A Sketching Trip” and “The Demonstrators,” I argue that Welty pictures the invisible and writes the unsayable by her use of the senses with two results. First, she creates a sense of the South that is simultaneously particular and universal. To illustrate this, I analyze passages especially replete in visual and olfactory senses. Second, Welty’s sensory language gives meaning to the abstract, universal concepts such as joy, love, art, and fear.La prose poétique de Eudora Welty est peinte en couleurs—rouge, rose, bleu, vert, argent, noir, blanc, gris-perle, jaune doré ; riche en langue figurative, et resplendissante d’images sensorielles caractérisées par leur synesthésie. L'art de Welty démontre la sensibilité extraordinaire de l’auteur, sensibilité mise au service de la découverte du monde en général, et du Sud en particulier. A partir de l’étude des observations de Welty et de la manière dont celles-ci sont dominées par les sens de l'odorat, du toucher, et de l’ouïe dans les nouvelles “June Recital” et “Moon Lake,” dans une sélection de ses lettres et ses commentaires sur une de ses photographie et dans les histoires “A Sketching Trip” et “The Demonstrators”, je démontrerai que Welty dépeint l'invisible et écrit l’imprononçable à travers son emploi des sens, amenant à deux résultats. Tout d'abord, elle créée un paysage sensoriel du Sud qui est à la fois particulier et universel. De manière à illustrer ce phénomène, j’analyse dans mon travail des passages où les références à la vue et à l'odorat sont particulièrement abondantes. Ensuite, le langage sensoriel de Welty lui permet de donner du sens à des concepts universels et abstraits, tels que la joie, l’amour, l’art et la peur

Celebrating Eudora Welty in Versailles, Paris, and New York

On September 10, 2009, the centennial of Eudora Welty’s birth was celebrated at the Municipal Library of Versailles, 5 rue de l’Indépendance Américaine, Versailles. Co-organizers of the 2009 Southern Studies Forum Géraldine Chouard and Jacques Pothier arranged the Versailles tribute that took place in La Salle de France where John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay negotiated the American independence from Great Britain in 1782. In this splendid atmosphere with dozens of incunabula in rea..

“Camellia house, Jackson, Mississippi, post-1936”

“Camellia house, Jackson, Mississippi, post-1936,” Eudora Welty as Photographer, p. 51, with the gracious permission of the Eudora Welty Foundation “Camellia house” illustrates Welty’s aesthetic awareness of the capabilities of the camera to transform light. The black and white lines of the shadows, ceiling boards, and sky pull our eyes to the white square at the photograph’s center. Yet we are simultaneously aware of the upright poles wrapped in barbershop shadow stripes and of the gently cu..

Celebrating Eudora Welty in Versailles, Paris, and New York

On September 10, 2009, the centennial of Eudora Welty’s birth was celebrated at the Municipal Library of Versailles, 5 rue de l’Indépendance Américaine, Versailles. Co-organizers of the 2009 Southern Studies Forum Géraldine Chouard and Jacques Pothier arranged the Versailles tribute that took place in La Salle de France where John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay negotiated the American independence from Great Britain in 1782. In this splendid atmosphere with dozens of incunabula in rea..

Reminiscing Eudora Welty

After several years of reading Welty and after the thrill of meeting her in the Old Capitol in Jackson upon the occasion of her 75th birthday, I chatted with her as with an old friend in my dreams one night. The setting seemed at first fantastical, fairylike. She came out of a rustic cabin and joined my mother, sister, and me at a picnic table under the tall pines and maples of the Catskill Mountains. It was after this dream that I had the courage to write to Welty to ask her the questions I ..

Forays into the Surreal: Eudora Welty’s “The Winds” and “A Sketching Trip” and Joseph Cornell

This essay demonstrates the ways that American author and photographer Eudora Welty was fully immersed in the 1930s culture of Surrealism as it pervaded New York City and how surrealist effects are clearly evident in her work. Archival research resoundingly establishes that Welty read fellow Mississippian Charles Henri Ford’s surrealist magazine View, imbibed the art of Dalí, Picasso, Miró, De Chirico, Magritte, and Tchelitchev, and wrote stories that illustrate the surrealists’ tenets of the “omnipotence of dream” and the “disinterested play of thought” as stated by André Breton. Following her reading of View: Americana Fantastica that featured a text and photomontage by Joseph Cornell, Welty wrote to Ford praising the publication. Ford forwarded her letter to Cornell. The emerging cross correspondence and literary appreciation between the three authors testify to the existence of a specific, original network of relationships. This essay demonstrates that within the cosmos of surrealism, Ford, Cornell, and Welty comprise a constellation of writers and artists who knew and admired one another without a specific literary salon for encouragement. With this new recognition and respect for Welty’s surrealist perspective, readers gain an entirely fresh appreciation of “The Winds” and “A Sketching Trip,” a story not published in any of Welty’s collections

Natasha Trethewey’s Personal Story as American History

As an ekphrastic writer, Natasha Trethewey (who won a Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard and is the current Poet Laureate of the U.S. in 2012) is superior. Whether drawing with artfully chosen words arranged in “elegant envelopes” of form to present Bellocq’s photographs of the madams of New Orlean’s Storyville district, to perform a reenactment of a famous portrait of the twentieth-century southern Fugitive poets, or to dissect the taxonomies of the eighteenth century Mexican Casta paintings, Trethewey paints her own clear pictures for her readers and then transitions smoothly into the abstract conundrums of race, gender, and colonialism of the past and present. This article presents both the visual catalysts of Trethewey’s poetry and the poetic results. In Belloq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006) and Thrall (2012), Trethewey creates a triptych of her personal story painted onto the canvas of America’s public history. She is the daughter of a white Canadian father who is a poet and an African American mother from Mississippi who is murdered by Trethewey’s step-father. The books as a whole are greater than the sum of their individual poems as they reveal the history that has been erased, ignored, or forgotten. Each public history, once examined, reveals itself to be a palimpsest.Poète de l’ekphrasis, Natasha Trethewey (prix Pulitzer et Poète Lauréat 2012) est l’une des grandes voix de la poésie américaine contemporaine. Dans une langue choisie et arrangée avec soin dans « d’élégantes enveloppes » formelles, elle présente les tenancières des maisons closes de la Nouvelle-Orléans photographiées par Bellocq, revisite le célèbre portrait des Fugitifs (mouvement poétique fondé dans le sud des États-Unis dans les années 1920) ou encore dissèque la taxonomie des portraits de castes à Mexico, au xviiie siècle, passant imperceptiblement de la clarté de la représentation à l’énigme abstraite des questions liées à la race, au genre et au colonialisme, passées ou présentes. Cet article analyse les lignes de force de la poétique de Trethewey. Belloq’s Ophelia (2002), Native Guard (2006) et Thrall (2012) composent un triptyque où le fil autobiographique croise la trame de l’Histoire des États-Unis. Trethewey est née d’un père blanc, Canadien d’origine, et d’une mère afro-américaine originaire du Mississippi, assassinée par son second mari. Considérés dans leur ensemble, ces trois recueils dévoilent une histoire oubliée, effacée ou ignorée, palimpseste de l’Histoire officielle