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A Postmodern Tendancy in Their Eyes Were Watching God
...Zora Neale Hurston lacks [any] excuse. The sensory sweep of her novel
carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not
addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she
knows how to satisfy. She exploits the phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the
phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race.
-- from "Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)," a review by Richard Wright
An unfortunate side effect of the postmodern tendency is often reactions like the above. Zora's work was not readily accepted in its time. Unlike fellow writers such as Faulkner and Joyce, Hurston's was not incubated by the academy until theory could catch up to inspiration. Like writers such as Nabokov, however, her postmodernity is subtle and her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is littered with trap doors to plunge the reader into a deeper interpretation of the text. Cynthia Bond picks up on this in her essay, "Language, Speech and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God," when she calls it a meta-linguistic project (Bond, 206)." Further evidence of this depth is in the plentitude of critical work to appear since Zora's rediscovery two decades ago and in the fact that, despite the voluminous attention given to Their Eyes Were Watching God, critics have failed to explore every facet of the novel. Ihab Hassan writes, in "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism," that we can look at writers of the past and realize their postmodernity. His theory fits with the idea that postmodernism is not a movement, but a trait that is exhibited by certain authors pushing the limits of their time. Mo...
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...h, K.A. and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.
Bond, Cynthia. "Language, Sign, and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God." Appiah and Gates 204-17.
Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discouse of the Human Sciences." Hutcheon and Natoli 223-43.
Foucault, Michel. "Excerpts from Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." Hutcheon and Natoli 333-341.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1990.
Hutcheon, Linda, and Natoli, Joseph, eds. A Postmodern Reader. New York: SUNY, 1993.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. "Excerpts from The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge." Hutcheon and Natoli 71-90.
Wright, Richard. "Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)." Appiah and Gates 16.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. Harper Perennial Modern Classics: Reissue Edition 2013
Zora Neale was an early 20th century American novelist, short story writer, folklorist, and anthropologist. In her best known novel Their eyes were watching God, Hurston integrated her own first-hand knowledge of African American oral culture into her characters dialogue and the novels descriptive passages. By combing folklore, folk language and traditional literary techniques; Hurston created a truly unique literary voice and viewpoint. Zora Neale Hurston's underlying theme of self-expression and search for one’s independence was truly revolutionary for its time. She explored marginal issues ahead of her time using the oral tradition to explore contentious debates. In this essay I will explore Hurston narrative in her depiction of biblical imagery, oppression of African women and her use of colloquial dialect.
Hurston, Lora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1990.
---. "Review of Their Eyes Were Watching God." Zora Neale Hurston - Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993
Ha, Quan. “Utopian and Dystopian Elements in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Rpt. in Themes of Conflict in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature of the American South. Ed. Ben Robertson. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 27-41. Print.
Jameson, Frederick. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" New Left Review. 146 (July-August 1984) Rpt in Storming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffrey, ed. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.
Human advancement, otherwise called hominization, is the transformative procedure that prompted the development of anatomically modern humans, starting with the developmental history of primates – specifically variety Homo – and prompting the rise of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of the hominid family, the considerable gorillas. This evolutionary procedure was
Walker, Kristen. "Feminism Present in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God." 7 February 2007. Yahoo Voices. 27 January 2014 .
This excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston’s book, Their Eyes Were watching God, is an example of her amazing writing. She makes us feel as if we are actually in her book, through her use of the Southern Black vernacular and admirable description. Her characters are realistic and she places special, well thought out sentences to keep us interested. Zora Neale Hurston’s art enables her to write this engaging story about a Southern black woman’s life.
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.
In “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Hurston breaks from the tradition of her time by rejecting the idea that the African American people should be ashamed or saddened by the color of their skin. She tells other African Americans that they should embrace their color and be proud of who they are. She writes, “[A socialite]…has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges,” and “I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads” (942-943). Whether she feels “colored” or not, she knows she is beautiful and of value. But Hurston writes about a time when she did not always know that she was considered colored.
originally a great tool for astronauts in outer space. It is now a very helpful
In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...
Postmodern literary criticism asserts that art, author, and audience can only be approached through a series of mediating contexts. "Novels, poems, and plays are neither timeless nor transcendent" (Jehlen 264). Even questions of canon must be considered within a such contexts. "Literature is not only a question of what we read but of who reads and who writes, and in what social circumstances...The canon itself is an historical event; it belongs to the history of the school" (Guillory 238,44).
Parker, Robert Dale. Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012 . Print.