Transcript Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston
"A Genius of the
South"
1901---1960
Novelist,
Folklorist,
Anthropologist
(from her tombstone)
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Essential Questions :
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Who was Zora Neale Hurston?
For whom is the book written?
What is the message of the
book?
How is the message of the
book conveyed?
How has the book been
perceived?
Who was Zora Neale Hurston?
nanny, maid, waitress, student,
sorority girl, poet, wife, author,
playwright, lecturer, folklorist,
college graduate, biographer,
teacher, actor, Guggenheim
winner, federal researcher,
movie consultant, divorcee,
distinguished alumnus,
traveller, maid, librarian,
columnist, substitute teacher,
pauper…ZORA!
"Mama exhorted her children at every
opportunity to 'jump at de sun.' We
might not land on the sun, but at least
we would get off the ground."
For whom was the book written?
Audiences are many and multi-layered, but
Hurston seems to have written the book for largely
for herself. She was originally writing herself out
of a hopeless love affair with a man who felt she
should give up her career for marriage.
Many other audiences
are secondary:
Who might those
audiences be?
“I tried to embalm all the tenderness of my passion for him in Their Eyes Were
Watching God.” –Hurston, in Autobiography
What is the message of the book?
This is a book
about…
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“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on
board. For some they come in with the tide. For
others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of
sight, never landing…. Hurston in Their Eyes
How is the message of the book conveyed?
voices
diction
arrangement
location
figurative language
symbol
motif
folklore
allusion
"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb
upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
- Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen
How has the book been perceived?
There is no book more important to me than this one. --Alice Walker 1967
“A well nigh perfect story — a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and
beautiful and shining with humor." Lucille Tompkins of the New York Times Book
Review 1937
"Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tra dition which was forced upon
the Negro in the theater, that is, the minstrel technique that makes the 'white folks'
laugh." –Richard Wright in 1930s
Hurston shows us that black men and women "attained personal identity not by
transcending the culture but by embracing it." –Cheryl Wall, recent critic
"For Hurston, the search for a telling form of language, indeed the search for a black
literary language itself, defines the search for the self." –Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
[The novel is one of] "resistance" [because it portrays] "the pressure of the dominant
culture on the thoughts and actions of the all-black community of Eatonville as well
as blacks as a whole.“- Gay Wilentz in Faith of a (Woman) Writer
"I am not tragically colored. There is no great
sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind
my eyes.“ –Z. N. Hurston
Why is this book of value to us?
Links:
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i.am/zora
www.zoranealehurston.cc/
www.zoranealehurston.ucf.edu/
www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/hurs-zor.htm
Wikipedia -- Zora Neale Hurston
falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/hurston.htm
memory.loc.gov/ammem/znhhtml/znhhome.html
voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/hurston_zora
_neale.html
• aalbc.com/authors/zoraneal.htm
• www.hurston-wright.org/index.shtml
“I have ceased to think in terms of race; I think only in terms of individuals….I am not interested in the
race problem, but I am interested in the problems of individuals, white ones and black ones.”—Hurston to
Nick Aaron Ford