English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Boys And The Bees, Lauren Mohler

Student Scholarship – English

In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the pear tree is seen as a symbol of Janie Crawford's sexuality and self-discovery. However, the pear tree can also be used to analyze Hurston's use of flipped gender roles and Freud's theories on physical maturation. Janie takes on the role of the bee, rather than the flower she wishes to be, in order to go through her journey to self-discovery and change Eatonville by sharing what she has learned.

Uncovering Shakespeare's Sisters In Special Collections And College Archives, Musselman Library, Suzanne J. Flynn, Lauren J. Browning, Madison G. Harvey, Hannah C. Lindert, Emma J. Poff, Cameron N. D'Amica, Teagan Lewis, Merlyn Maldonado Lopez, Audrey J. Nikolich, Mariah L. Beck, Phoebe M. Doscher, Chloe Dougherty, Hana Huskic, Samantha L. Burr, Elizabeth F. D'Arcangelo, Logan Shippee

Student Publications

Foreword by Professor Suzanne J. Flynn

I have taught the first-year seminar, Shakespeare’s Sisters, several times, and over the years I have brought the seminar’s students to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. There, the wonderful librarians have treated the students to a special exhibit of early women’s manuscripts and first editions, beginning with letters written by Elizabeth I and proceeding through important works by seventeen and eighteenth-century women authors such as Aemelia Lanyer, Anne Finch, Aphra Behn, and Mary Wollstonecraft. This year I worked with Carolyn Sautter, the Director of Special Collections and College Archives, to give my …

Black Dreams: Sight And Sound In African American Life Stories, Karintha Lowe

English Honors Projects

This project examines the work of Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Langston Hughes, in conjunction with the work of literary and psychoanalytic theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, and Laura Mulvey. Beginning with Benjamin Franklin’s conception of the “American Dream” as emphasizing a linear, progressive understanding of time and space, I argue that Douglass, Hurston, Petry, and Hughes all reshape this narrative of upward mobility to include the experiences of marginalized communities. By analyzing how each author used multiple genres, including autobiography, parody, song, and poetry, to form a single narrative, I contend that these life stories …

Zora Neale Hurston And The Narrative Aesthetics Of Dance Performance, Jennifer M. Sittig

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Zora Neale Hurston’s literature involves dance and performance. What makes this a viable topic of inquiry is her texts often exhibit the performative, whether portraying culture or using dance and associated folk rituals to create complex meaning. Hurston’s use of black vernacular and storytelling evokes lyrical expression in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." African and Caribbean Diasporas in Hurston’s literature reflects primitive dance performances and folklore. This novel requires lyrical analysis. The storytelling feature of performance arts and reclamations of the body are present in Hurston’s text. In recent academic settings, the body has come to occupy a crucial place …

Mapping The Terrain Of Black Writing During The Early New Negro Era, A Yęmisi Jimoh

Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series

No abstract provided.

Literary Retrospection In The Harlem Renaissance, Claudia Stokes

English Faculty Research

In 1925, book collector and Harlem Renaissance patron Arthur A. Schomburg began the essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," published in Alain Locke's landmark anthology The New Negro (1925), by proclaiming that the "American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. ... So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and opt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all" (231). These words might be surprising to the beginning student of the Harlem Renaissance, seduced by …

Social Spaces: Family Secrets, And Today's Students, Rebecca Belcher-Rankin

Faculty Scholarship – English

Southern women writers of literature uncover family secrets of dysfunction, abuse, violence and hierarchical rigidity as seen in the works of Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker.

"Why Don't He Like My Hair?": Constructing African-American Standards Of Beauty In Toni Morrison's "Song Of Solomon" And Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", Bertram D. Ashe

English Faculty Publications

African-Americans, with their traditionally African features, have always had an uneasy coexistence with the European (white) ideal of beauty. According to Angela M. Neal and Midge L. Wilson, "Compared to Black males, Black females have been more profoundly affected by the prejudicial fallout surrounding issues of skin color, facial features, and hair. Such impact can be attributed in large part to the importance of physical attractiveness for all women" (328). For black women, the most easily controlled feature is hair. While contemporary black women sometimes opt for cosmetic surgery or colored contact lenses, hair alteration (i.e., hair-straightening "permanents," hair weaves, …

Zora Neale Hurston, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Some new information is occasionally being ferreted out that may help to cast additional light on some of these issues, but quite clearly Zora Neale Hurston will remain something of an enigma - too complex a figure to reach any easy conclusions about, except perhaps that she defies simple characterization. People responded to her (and still do) very emotionally: her detractors despise her bitterly; her defenders love her passionately. All agree that she was eccentric, colorful, entertaining, humorous, and unforgettable.

Perhaps the most crucial question to pose about her is why one of the most important figures in the Harlem …

Following In Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks: Autobiographical Notes By The Author Of Shuckin' And Jivin', Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

As I began to peruse collections and studies of black folklore, I found that although considerable work had been done from which I was l earning a great deal, there were some aspects of black folklore with which I was personally familiar (from my childhood in Charles City, Virginia, my college days in Petersburg, and my adult life in Richmond) that I had observed as influence in numerous literary works, particularly on temporary works, that were not included in the material was finding, or were not presented in anything even vaguely resembling the versions I knew and saw represented in …

Tuning In The Boiler Room And The Cotton Patch: New Directions In The Study Of Afro-American Folklore, Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

One of the first problems in the study of folklore is, of course, the collection of materials. In almost every area of Black folklore, the collecting was initiated by whites. As I have noted elsewhere, "Black folk forms seem to thrive quietly and abashedly in the Black community as items of private enjoyment and public shame until they are ' discovered ' by whites who legitimize them for the American public-Black and white. Such has been the case with the general folk tales (the animal tales, the etiological myths, the Slave John tales, etc.), the spirituals, and the blues. The …