Speaking Bodies, Kinesthetic Awareness, and Lacanian Performativity in Eudora Welty's "Shower of Gold"

Abstract

T HE RICH PANORAMA OF E UDORA W ELTY ’ S LITERARY AND PHOTO graphic output reveals a lifelong interrogation of forms of consciousness that arise from the experience of embodied beings shaped by networks of cultural discourse. By embodied, I assume body theorist Carrie Noland’s 2009 definition in Agency and Embodiment when she identifies the “process whereby collective behaviors and beliefs, acquired through acculturation, are rendered individual and ‘lived’ at the level of the body” (9). To date, the most far-reaching examination of this notion of the body in Welty studies Pollack in Eudora Fiction