At the end of a lackluster discussion of
Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.” in a college English class last
fall, one of my students raised her hand. “I know that Welty is
supposed to be really good,” she said, “but I don’t get it.” She
objected to the clichés, the cartoonishness.
But does Eudora feel cliché because she invented certain Southern
clichés? She read the extremes of Southerners, of human behavior, and
immortalized our foibles in words that would influence the next few
generations of writers. As Tony Earley observed, “I have a
theory—perhaps unformed and, without question, unsubstantiated—that most
bad Southern writing is descended directly from Eudora Welty’s ‘Why I
Live at the P.O.’”
I defended Welty’s greatness during that class—I even played them an
excerpt of the author reading the story aloud, her mouth rolling fast
around the syllables like gumballs—but over the course of the semester I
couldn’t help marking a shift in how young Southerners, black and
white, read the Southern giants: not in awe, but with a sense of
exhaustion. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/why-my-students-dont-call-themselves-southern-writers/
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