Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Welty, Eudora (Vol. 105) - Harriet Pollack (essay date Fall 1986)

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Harriet Pollack (essay date Fall 1986)

SOURCE: "Words Between Strangers: On Welty, Her Style, and Her Audience," Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, Fall, 1986, pp. 481-505.

[In the following essay, Pollack analyzes Welty's relationship with her readers.]

Eudora Welty often speaks of her storytelling in terms that suggest it is a strategy for dealing with separateness. She identifies the source of her work as "attentiveness and care for the world … and a wish to connect with it," and she tells us that her "continuing passion" is "to part a curtain … that falls between people." But paradoxically, while Welty expresses her desire for "connection," she nonetheless prefers what she calls obstruction as the means to this end. "The fine story writers seem to be … obstructionists," she notes in "The Reading and Writing of Short Stories," and she finds the "quondam obstruction"—the sheer opaque curtain that veils the meaning...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Maureen Howard (review date 2 November 1980)
   2. Eudora Welty with Jo Brans (interview date Summer 1981)
   3. Paul Bailey (review date 4 June 1982)
   4. Nancy B. Sederberg (review date Fall 1983)
   5. Eudora Welty with Tom Royals and John Little (interview date 1984)
   6. Eric Homberger (review date 20 July 1984)
   7. Eudora Welty with Barbara Lazear Ascher (interview date Autumn 1984)
   8. Lee Smith (review date Spring 1985)
   9. Daniel Aaron (review date 2 May 1985)
   10. Harriet Pollack (essay date Fall 1986)
   11. Suzanne Marrs (essay date October 1986)
   12. Barbara Harrell Carson (essay date Spring 1988)
   13. Floyd C. Watkins (essay date Spring 1988)
   14. James Walter (essay date Fall 1988)
   15. Eudora Welty with Sally Wolff (interview date January 1990)
   16. Jan Nordby Gretlund (essay date Fall 1992)
   17. Sally Wolff (essay date Fall 1992)
   18. Eben E. Bass (essay date Spring 1993)
   19. Gary M. Ciuba (essay date Fall 1993)
   20. Alexandr Vaschenko (essay date Fall 1993)
   21. Carol Shields (review date 12 August 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Eudora Welty