Fleeting Moments and Wonderful Weirdness in Welty

Panel at Society for the Study of Southern Literature Conference (March 28-31, 2026 at Fisk University in Nashville, TN)

Chaired by Laura Wilson

      In the 2013 issue of the Eudora Welty Review, Mitch Frye points to Welty’s “astonishing stories” that “are filled with weird gems” and her oft “interplay between the homely and the unheimlich” (77). Indeed, from Eugene’s brief witnessing of a streetcar accident in “Music from Spain” and the talking head in a trunk of The Robber Bridegroom to the Guinea pig in a pocket and mysterious naked man with a herd of goats in The Wide Net and Other Stories, Welty’s work proliferates with fleeting moments, uses of the uncanny, and just down right oddities. What do such unsettling moments and images actually provoke in her work? How does the sensational become narrative strategy? What possibilities are enabled specifically through the fantastic? Welty, in such curious moments, seems to revel in wonder, “to dance with astonishment” to “be blessed with more imagination” than “the given moment” knows “what to do with” (“Meditation on Seeing” 1974). With this theme in mind, this panel invites papers that consider any fleeting moments and wonderful weirdness that Welty dances with—the moments that take us by surprise, when the ordinary becomes extraordinary—throughout her oeuvre. 

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The unheimlich or the uncanny
• People or actions that seem out of place or out of time
• Imagination and dreaming
• Weird characters - the “freak,” the outcast, the “foreign,” the eccentric
• Horror and the supernatural
• Violence
• Surrealism, visual anomalies
• Altered forms of consciousness
• Science fiction, machinery, invention

Send 300 word abstracts and 100 word bios by December 5th to panel chair Laura Wilson (archivalauras@gmail.com). Earlier statements of interest are encouraged.