The Importance of Speech and Humor in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

The Importance of Speech and Humor in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God PDF Author: Natalie Lewis
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638268977
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 19

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0 (A), Free University of Berlin (JFK-Institute), course: Hauptseminar: Humor in Women's Literature, language: English, abstract: The Harlem Renaissance, an African American cultural movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, also refered to as New Negro Renaissance, marked the first time that black literature and arts were seriously recognized by American publishers, critics and intellectuals. Participants in the movement attempted to refute the negative racist stereotypes of black life deeply imbedded in white popular as well as high culture. In a time when many black middle class intellectuals shamefully distanced themselves from their cultural heritage, artists of the Harlem Renaissance showed a strong sense of racial pride in exploring the African and Southern roots of black experience and experimenting with elements of traditional African American folk culture in different genres. One of the most significant figures emerging from this literary period was the anthropologist and fiction writer Zora Neale Hurston. After her college education, she engaged in extensive anthropological field research on rural black tradition in her all-black hometown Eatonville in Florida as well as the Carribean region and published the collected tales, sermons, songs and jokes in f olklore collections, e.g. Mules and Men. As a novelist, she made use of her extensive knowledge of African American Southern rural dialect and oral culture by texualizing it in the dialogues of her fictional characters. Zora Neale Hurston was one of the first black writers to give an acurate depiction of African American humor. She demonstrated that humor is a crucial element of speech within the black community not only for establishing communal bonds through laughter but also because it plays an important role in the assertion of one’s voice. Hurston’s second and best-known novel Their Eyes Were Watching God focuses on the black woman’s place in society. The protagonist and story-teller Janie presents her quest for self-fulfillment and struggle against ve rbal oppression, over two decades and three marital relationships; as she gains experience by experimenting with different roles, she learns how to assert her voice within the community and to humor life.

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Their Eyes Were Watching God PDF Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780800074142
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 159

Book Description


Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God PDF Author: Harold Bloom
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 0791097889
Category : African American women in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Critics have suggested that Zora Neale Hurston s Their Eyes Were Watching God has helped revise a male-dominated literary canon. All-new critical essays touch on subjects such as sight and vision, speech and dialect, and the ways the novel subverts traditional power structures, and more.

The Mule-Bone

The Mule-Bone PDF Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 54

Book Description
This story begins in Eatonville, Florida, on a Saturday afternoon with Jim and Dave fighting for Daisy's affection. An argument breaks out between two men, and Jim picks up a hock bone from a mule and knocks Dave out. Because of that Jim gets arrested and is held for trial in Joe Clarke's barn. When the trial begins the townspeople are divided along religious lines: Jim's Methodist supporters sit on one side of the church, Dave's Baptist supporters on the other. The issue to be decided at the trial is whether or not Jim has committed a crime.

Mules and Men

Mules and Men PDF Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061749877
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
Zora Neale Hurston brings us Black America’s folklore as only she can, putting the oral history on the written page with grace and understanding. This new edition of Mules and Men features a new cover and a P.S. section which includes insights, interviews, and more. For the student of cultural history, Mules and Men is a treasury of Black America’s folklore as collected by Zora Neale Hurston, the storyteller and anthropologist who grew up hearing the songs and sermons, sayings and tall tales that have formed and oral history of the South since the time of slavery. Set intimately within the social context of Black life, the stories, “big old lies,” songs, voodoo customs, and superstitions recorded in these pages capture the imagination and bring back to life the humor and wisdom that is the unique heritage of Black Americans.

How It Feels to be Colored Me

How It Feels to be Colored Me PDF Author: Zora Neale Hurston
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504081471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 8

Book Description
The acclaimed author of Their Eyes Were Watching God relates her experiences as an African American woman in early-twentieth-century America. In this autobiographical essay, author Zora Neale Hurston recounts episodes from her childhood in different communities in Florida: Eatonville and Jacksonville. She reflects on what those experiences showed her about race, identity, and feeling different. “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” was originally published in 1928 in the magazine The World Tomorrow.

The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance

The Tragedy and Comedy of Resistance PDF Author: Carole Anne Taylor
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151281959X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
"A major contribution to literary and cultural studies—bold, illuminating, and persuasively argued."—Karla Holloway, Duke University

Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God PDF Author: Christina Gieseler
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640600002
Category : Other (Philosophy) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 73

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, Hawai'i Pacific University, course: 20th Century Women Writers of Color, language: English, abstract: Nora Zeale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" can be considered "one of the sexiest, most 'healthily' rendered heterosexual love stories in our literature" (Walker, "Zora Neale Hurston" 88). This paper provides information about the outer contexts of the novel, as well as inductive analyses of the novel. The first part of the paper (Ch. 2-5) reveals information about the author and the historical and literary context of the time in which Hurston's novel was published. The second part of the paper (Ch. 6-7) starts off with an analysis of the plot and characters of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and then focuses on the theme of Otherness as it occurs in Huston's novel. The examinations of the concept of "Otherness", alongside with other terms such as "Dichotomization" and "Stigma", will be based on the concepts that Rosenblum and Travis describe in their work The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class and Sexual Orientation.

Handbook of the American Short Story

Handbook of the American Short Story PDF Author: Erik Redling
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110585324
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

Book Description
The American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.

Approaches to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works

Approaches to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works PDF Author: John Wharton Lowe
Publisher: Modern Language Association of America
ISBN: 9781603290432
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Zora Neale Hurston emerged as a celebrated writer of the Harlem Renaissance, fell into obscurity toward the end of her life, yet is now recognized as a great American author. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is popular among general readers and is widely taught in universities, colleges, and secondary schools. A key text of African American and women's literature, it has also been studied by scholars interested in the 1930s, small-town life, modernism, folklore, and regionalism, and it has been viewed through the lenses of dialect theory, critical race theory, and transnational and diasporan studies.Considering the ubiquity of Hurston's work in the nation's classrooms, there have been surprisingly few book-length studies of it. This volume helps instructors situate Hurston's work against the various cultures that engendered it and understand her success as short story writer, playwright, novelist, autobiographer, folklorist, and anthropologist. Part 1 outlines Hurston's publication history and the reemergence of the author on the literary scene and into public consciousness. Part 2 first concentrates on various approaches to teaching Their Eyes, looking at Hurston's radical politics and use of folk culture and dialect; contemporary reviews of the novel, including contrary remarks by Richard Wright; Janie's search for identity in Hurston's all-black hometown, Eatonville; and the central role of humor in the novel. The essays in part 2 then take up Hurston's other, rarely taught novels, Jonah's Gourd Vine,Moses, Man of the Mountain, and Seraph on the Suwanee. Also examined here are Hurston's anthropological works, chief among them Mules and Men, a staple for many years on American folklore syllabi, and Tell My Horse, newly reconsidered in Caribbean and postcolonial studies.