Eudora Welty and Postmodern Performativity

[...]exploring the ways in which many of Welty's texts enact the irrevocable shattering of authority taking place in the culture at large provides a measure of Welty's postmodernity. Few would because Welty directs the whole force of the story that unfolds toward uncovering and advertising...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Eudora Welty review 2014-04, Vol.6 (1), p.27-37
Main Author:	Fuller, Stephen M.
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1900-1999 1909-2001 A Memory American literature authority Authors Criticism and interpretation Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Jacques, 1930-2004 English Literature Essays Lyotard, Jean François narrator parody Performative (Philosophy) Performativity Postmodernism Postmodernism (Literature) short story Twentieth Century United States Welty, Eudora Welty, Eudora (1909-2001)
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Summary:	[...]exploring the ways in which many of Welty's texts enact the irrevocable shattering of authority taking place in the culture at large provides a measure of Welty's postmodernity. Few would because Welty directs the whole force of the story that unfolds toward uncovering and advertising the incalculable influence of past contexts on determining identity as the narrator experiences it in the present as well as toward the impossibility of disentangling contexts of all kinds, including those related to space, class, age, gender, and culture. [...]différance appears to operate, here, to defer not only the original name of the speaker speaking but to defer the notion of the past and collapse it into the notion of the present, categories that would seem opposed. [...]control over language seems to constantly evade her, while the pursuit of control takes on the role of a persecuting agent. Stories about acceptable conventions for feminine behavior readily yield their authority to other stories about the desired boy at school and this shabby family at the beach. [...]an allied observation about the theme of age that Welty seems intent on making seems to involve the way that the narrator, a grown-up supposedly exploring old thoughts, still has not overcome the phobias of her childhood and ultimately supplies a speech that performs a washing away of the distinction between child and adult.
ISSN:	1947-3370 2165-266X 2165-266X