尤多拉·韦尔蒂《乐观者的女儿》的共同体书写

Community Building in The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty

学界常将美国南方作家韦尔蒂与地方主义相联系,却忽视她的共同体情怀和世界主义视野,本文认为这有失公允。本文以《乐观者的女儿》为例,探讨韦尔蒂如何立足于现代化进程中的美国南方,探寻危机年代的共同体模式。小说将共同体与南方性紧密结合,又与欧洲文化进行对话和互动,倡导植根于地方的世界主义。它回眸旧南方农耕时代的乡村共同体,铺陈新南方的转型焦虑,并寻求工业化背景下新型共同体的构建之路。由此《乐观者的女儿》重新审视“地域主义”标签,以此打破文化本质主义窠臼,探索多元文化认同主题。

It is unreasonable that Eudora Welty’s literary regionalism is overestimated and her concern about community and cosmopolitanism is ignored in the academia.In The Optimist’s Daughter,Welty focuses on American South during modernization to explore possibilities of building a community in the transitional period.The imagined community is closely associated not only with American Southerness,but also with European culture to promote cosmopolitanism rooted in the specific region.The fiction looks back on the southern agrarian community and imagines a new type of community in the context of industrialization to deal with transitional anxiety.Thus,the so-called regional literature can be interpreted from multiculturalism rather than cultural fundamentalism.