Crayon enlargements of life.

Hello everyone!

I would like to spend this semester working with Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

A few quick searches show that there exists a huge body of writing on her and her work.

Here is a concise summary of the novel from the official Zora Neale Hurston website:

With haunting sympathy and piercing immediacy, Their Eyes Were Watching God tells the story of Janie Crawford's evolving selfhood through three marriages. Light-skinned, long-haired, dreamy as a child, Janie grows up expecting better treatment than she gets until she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who engages her heart and spirit in equal measure and gives her the chance to enjoy life without being a man's mule or adornment. Though Jaine's story does not end happily, it does draw to a satisfying conclusion. Janie is one black woman who doesn't have to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams, instead Janie proclaims that she has done "two things everbody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves."

The critical thread that I am currently most interested in following can be summed up in an excerpt from Henry Louis Gates' afterword to the novel, "Zora Neale Hurston: 'A Negro Way of Saying'":

Part of Hurston's received heritage -- and perhaps the paramount received notion that links the novel of manners in the Harlem renaissance, the social realism of the thirties, and the cultural nationalism of the Black Arts movement

--

was the idea that racism had reduced black people to mere ciphers, to beings who only react to an omnipresent racial oppression, whose culture is "deprived" where different, and whose psyches are in the main "pathological." Albert Murray, the writer and social critic, calls this "the Social Science Fiction Monster." Socialists, separatists, and civil rights advocates alike have been devoured by this beast.

Hurston thought this idea degrading, its propagation a trap, and railed against it. It was, she said, upheld by "The sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a dirty deal." Unlike Hughes and Wright, Hurston choose deliberately to ignore this "false picture that distorted..." Freedom, she wrote in Moses, Man of the Mountain, "was something internal....The man himself must make his own emancipation." And she declared her first novel a manifesto against the "arrogance" of whites assuming that "black lives are only defensive reactions to white actions." Her strategy was not calculated to please. (189)

Gates, Henry Louis. Afterword. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel. By Zora Neale Hurston. 1937. San Bernadino: The Borgo Press, 1990. Print.

I look forward to meeting you all come Wednesday!