The Eye That Is Language

Danile Pitavy-Souques was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Weltys view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Weltys fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Weltys work. The volume explores beloved stories in Weltys masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as "A Curtain of Green," "Flowers for Marjorie," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "A Still Moment," "Livvie," "Circe," "Kin," and The Optimists Daughter, One Writers Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include "Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" (1979), "A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Weltys brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal. Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souquess European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Weltys narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.