English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Ghosts Of Memphis, Dale Tate

FUSION

A personal essay about one man’s musical journey to the place where it all began for him, and his battles to reconcile modern day values with the racial struggles and discrimination past times and past places. This “Personal Place Essay” was submitted for American Literature (ENGL 2130) in February 2023.

This piece was written in response to an assignment that asked students to write a personal essay based on a place to which they are connected. An experience in that place is the foundation of the essay; this experience is woven together with detailed description, reflection, and analysis of both …

Watching The Storm: Old Testament Reinvention Of God In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Evelyn Kelly

Language, Literature & Writing Student Scholarship

Author Zora Neale Hurston once claimed that “the Negro is not a Christian really” (Harvey 191). Yet she not only wrote a novel with “God” in the title, but multiple stories that echo specific biblical themes and motifs of salvation, judgment, violence, and pilgrimage. English scholar and professor Glenda Weathers has explored in depth one such parallel, the motif of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in her article, “Biblical Trees, Biblical Deliverance.” With Weather’s analysis, Janie is a Black Eve who is not saved by a male descendant but starts to experience echoes of paradise once …

Belonging To Harlem: Reading Zora Neale Hurston’S Story In Slang, Rumi Coller-Takahashi

Living in Languages

This essay examines Zora Neale Hurston’s “Story in Harlem Slang” (1942) to analyze how the reading experience of the story captures relational dynamics in the community of Harlem. Written in the “Harlemese,” a distinctive lexicon developed in the 1920s, the story seemingly serves as a dictionary with an attached glossary and illustrations of the vernacular words. Reading the story, however, not so much allows the readers to join the linguistic community as requires them to be conscious of the border-crossing movements. Such a structure is intertwined with the character’s theatrical life as a male prostitute, whose way of belonging to …

The Wh-Eye Of The Storm: How Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, And Arif Anwar Fictionalize Extreme Weather In Their Works, Elena Vedovello

Pomona Senior Theses

In this thesis, I used Robin Wall Kimmerer’s and James D. Rice’s ideas of “ecological imagination” to analyze three twentieth and twenty-first century works that feature historical extreme weather events. American Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston introduces her fictional characters to the historical force of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God; British Modernist writer Virginia Woolf writes about the 1609 Great Frost in Orlando; and Bangladeshi author Arif Anwar sets his novel The Storm during and around the infamous Bhola Cyclone of 1970.

Although these authors and their novels stem …

Writing Not Writing: Transdisciplinary Poetics, Institutional Critique, Miriam L. Atkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is an exploration of transdisciplinary creative practice as a means of institutional critique. The artists I have chosen as my primary focus—Robert Kocik, Eleni Stecopoulos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jimmie Durham, Leslie Scalapino and Lyn Hejinian—employ multiple mediums and fields of discourse to address the presumptions and exclusions that are structurally integral to the institutions that house them. They enact “architextural” interventions through their use of forms that move between the page and three dimensional space, incorporating architecture, sculpture, drawing, painting, film, performance, poetry and prose. My work aims at a renewed understanding of critique as such, and therefore—though …

Their Eyes Were Watching A Goddess: Zora Neale Hurston's Vodou Subtext, Laura R. Sheffler

Beyond the Margins: A Journal of Graduate Literary Scholarship

Written in Haiti but set in Florida, Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God makes rich use of Haitian religious traditions to empower African American women. Vodou, the religion of the slaves, was both a religious act and a political one in Haiti. African slaves continued to find power in the evocation of their gods to defy the colonial powers. Hurston taps into the subverted powers of the Vodou pantheon and rituals to speak to her American audience, linking the physical rebellions of the earthly world with the spiritual world. One voice of Hurston's double narrative speaks to …

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.

Acknowledging The "Forgotten" Contributions Of Black Female Authors: A Review Of _Women Of The Harlem Renaissance_ By Cheryl Wall, Emily M. Allmond

The Corinthian

This review critiques Cheryl Wall's book, Women of the Harlem Renaissance. In this book, Wall addresses the contributions black female authors and artists made to the Harlem Renaissance. The life stories of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston are examined and analyzed by Wall to show the obstacles these female authors faced, and the ways in which the subject matter of their works was affected by their circumstances and cultural upbringing. For many years, these contributions were largely overlooked by both critics and popular culture. Wall's narrative illuminates the significance of these contributions, provides some context for …

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 …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

Babacar Mbaye

No abstract provided.

Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller, Mary Catherine Russell

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

This paper examines the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and her contribution to American literature in the 20th Century. While previous critical analysis of Hurston’s work has focused primarily on her most popular novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, this paper examines Hurston’s career by taking a holistic approach to the body of her literary works. Hurston’s early career as an anthropologist is shown to provide a foundation for her later interest in folklore. In turn, her connection and participation in the Harlem Renaissance gave Hurston’s writing a nuanced and individualized style as part of the American modernist …

When Worlds Collide: Feminism, Conservatism And Twentieth Century Authors, Madison Cooney

Honors Theses

Two streams of literary narratives appearing during the Great Depression grew from personal and historical experiences of their women authors with overlapping but very different perspectives on American cultural history. These were: 1) The accounts of rural frontier Midwestern regional experiences of Laura Ingalls Wilder, as edited and shaped in part by her daughter and writing partner Rose Wilder Lane, in retrospect during the New Deal era; and 2) the 1920s urban African-American experience of Zora Neale Hurston in the context of an emerging national black artistic and intellectual scene. Through a shared feminism emphasizing freedom for women, these authors …

A Woman's Voice And Identity: Narrative Métissage As A Solution To Voicelessness In American Literature, Kali Lauren Oldacre

MA in English Theses

The objective of this thesis was to analyze the progression of a woman’s voice in literature looking particularly at three American women writers spanning the 20th and into the 21st century—Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edwidge Danticat. In conjunction, these three novels show a progression through the history of American women’s literature, demonstrating the successes and failures of voice and silence in their works and the ways in which creating an identity through voice is necessary, even if one must create it complexly. Ultimately, the authors establish a voice in their works that lays the foundation for writers who …

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 …

The Significance Of John S. Mbiti's Works In The Study Of Pan-African Literature, Babacar Mbaye

The Journal of Traditions & Beliefs

No abstract provided.

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.

Between The Camera And The Gun: The Problem Of Epistemic Violence In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Katherine Ann Rich

Theses and Dissertations

Since the 75th anniversary of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in 2003, a growing number of journalists and historians writing about the disaster have incorporated Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the official historical record of the hurricane. These writers often border on depicting Their Eyes as the authentic experience of black migrant workers impacted by the hurricane and subsequent flood. Within the novel itself, however, Hurston theorizes on the potential epistemic violence that occurs when a piece of evidence—a photograph, fallen body, or verbal artifact—is used to judge a person. Without a person's …

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 …

"I Will Learn You Something If You Listen To This Song": Southern Women Writers' Representations Of Music In Fiction, Courtney George

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation offers a rhetorical analysis of the formation of women’s memory, history, and communities in intersections of musical and literary expression in the American South, a region graced with a vital but underexamined tradition of female musicianship. Recent scholars have deconstructed the imagined narrative of southern culture as static, patriarchal, and white to uncover alternative stories and cultures that exist outside of canonical literature. This project significantly expands current understandings of these conflicting narratives by investigating how women writers recall, reclaim, and re-envision women’s roles in southern music to challenge, comply, and/or identify with women’s prescribed place in the …

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.

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

"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 …