Academic literature on the topic 'Their eyes were watching God (Hurston)'

This thesis establishes parallel claims about how women’s autobiography as a genreintersects with fiction as a means to share an author’s opinions on issues of race, gender,class, and topics that the publishing industry deems ‘controversial’, using Zora Neale Hurston’s works Their Eyes Were Watching God and Dust Tracks on a Road as points of comparison. Throughout this thesis, I will show that Their Eyes Were Watching God is a novel that by virtue of its content is a political novel because of how it represents an overlooked demographic of people and the novel’s ripple effect on later black female writers as one of the first novels that celebrates black female joy. TEWWG does the work of literary representation that publishers did not allow DToaR to do because of the fear that the book would not sell as well if it included more of Hurston’s own political perspective. The second claim that I make is that TEWWG is first dismissed because of its lack of ‘seriousness’ in subject matter by Hurston’s peers, but its use of nature metaphors like the horizon and the tree and motifs like desire and dreams allow for issues of gender, race, class, and love to be discussed because they are shrouded in a literary image disguise.

This paper gives critical attention to the nature versus caution porch conversation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, arguing that this is a legitimate addition to the anthropological discussion of nature versus culture. Addressing literary critics as well as scholars of the environmental humanities and of multispecies studies, I argue that Hurston's nature-caution discussion is a helpful epistemology which Hurston employs throughout her novel to suggest a single, unified way of understanding the human and nonhuman.

Masters of Art<br>Zora Neale Hurston is a significant figure in American fiction and is strongly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, the period noted for the emergence of literature by people of African-American descent. Hurston worked as a writer of fiction and of anthropological research and this mini-thesis will discuss aspects of her novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, first published in 1937. While the novel traces the psychological development of the central female character, Janie Mae Crawford and, thus, demonstrates several features of a conventional Bildungsroman, the novel also contains some intriguing innovations in respect of narration and voice. These innovations imply that the novel can be read in terms of the qualities commonly associated with the Modernist novel. This contention becomes significant when it is understood that a considerable degree of critical responses to the novel have discounted these connections. The novel is widely accepted to be a story about a woman’s journey to self-actualisation through the relationships she has with the men in her life. Much of the criticism related to the novel is based on this aspect of it, with many stating that Janie’s voice is often silenced by the third-person narrator at crucial moments in the text and that, as a consequence, she does not achieve complete self-actualisation by the end of the novel. This thesis will examine the significance of the shifts between first-person and thirdperson narration and the manifestations of other voices or means of articulation, which give the novel a multi-vocal quality. The importance of this innovation will also be considered, particularly when it is taken into account that Hurston sought to incorporate some elements associated with the oral tradition into her work as a writer of fiction.

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 ability to use self-representation to give an "understandin'" (7) to go along with the evidence, snapshots or textual evidence threaten to violently separate people from their prior knowledge of themselves. By offering the historical context of photographs of African Americans in the Post-Reconstruction South, I argue that Janie experiences this epistemic violence as a young girl when seeing a photograph of herself initiates her into the racial hierarchy of the South. A few decades later, while on trial for shooting her husband Tea Cake, Janie again faces epistemic violence when the evidence of Tea Cake's body is used to judge her and her marriage; however, by giving an understandin' to go along with the evidence through self-representation, Janie is able to clarify that which other forms of evidence distort and is able to go free. Modern texts appropriating Their Eyes run the risk of enacting epistemic violence on the victims of the hurricane, the novel, and history itself when they present the novel as the complete or authentic perspective of the migrant workers in the hurricane. By properly situating the novel as a historical text that offers a particular narrative of the hurricane rather than the complete or authentic experience of the victims, modern writers can honor Hurston's literary achievement without robbing the actual victims of the hurricane of their voice.

The figuration of Janie in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is an undeniable contestation of gender oppression. The contours of previous criticism have mapped out various directions of arguments, some of which make feminism a sort of critical mantra of Hurston criticism. In spite of such existing claims that the novel challenges the premises of women’s oppression within the African American social milieu, a closer look at the text shows that critics have not exhausted all that needs to be said on this subject. This essay premises its argument on the assertion that Their Eyes protests entrenched patriarchy and middle class or bourgeois capitalism. These two ideologies dominate Janie’s grandmother’s mind, and compel her to teach the protagonist to submit and accept inferior gender status, hence affirming the argument that women as well as men contribute to the existing patriarchal order. Indoctrinated into this system by her grandmother, Janie experiences three marriages that make her realize that she can no longer live according to her grandmother’s wishes. Instead, she makes personal efforts to denounce capitalist patriarchy in order to live her life to the fullest. She explicitly tells her friend Pheoby, “Ah done lived Grandma’s way, now Ah means to live mine” (114). Janie’s process of self discovery brings to the surface complex gender oppression which cross the racial and class divide. My project will use radical feminist and Marxist feminist theories to look at Janie’s three oppressive marriages, her support at the trial from white women, and the feminist significance of the catastrophic hurricane at the end of the novel. This natural phenomenon, I intend to argue, is symbolic of a feminist, anti-capitalist revolt which powerfully articulates Marx’s theory with regards to capitalism’s appropriation of women and nature for purposes of exploitation.<br>Thesis ([M.A.] - Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Science, Dept. of English

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior<br>A presente dissertação possui dois objetivos principais. O primeiro, presente na parte I, é analisar a construção identitária feminina da personagem principal da obra Their Eyes Were Watching God, de Zora Neale Hurston. Sendo assim, a primeira parte desta dissertação é composta de quatro capítulos, sendo que ao longo dos três primeiros, antes da discussão propriamente dita, o trabalho busca aproximar o leitor da discussão. Para isso, os três capítulos iniciais têm o intuito de deixar o leitor familiarizado primeiro com a autora, depois com suas obras e, por último, com o momento histórico vivido pelos Estados Unidos no período do movimento cultural afro-americano conhecido como Harlem Renaissance. O segundo objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a tradução da obra, Seus Olhos Viam Deus, para o português e, se possível, fazer sugestões para as encruzilhadas e obstáculos tradutórios que porventura tenham sido enfrentados pelo tradutor. Esta dissertação visa com isso apresentar soluções que possam ser utilizadas em futuras traduções de obras de escritoras afro-americanas para o português do Brasil. Portanto, para isso, a segunda e a terceira parte deste trabalho, compostas de mais três capítulos, trazem uma revisão sobre as teorias tradutórias recentes e, em perspectiva inovadora, destacam pontos a serem abordados na discussão<br>The present dissertation has two main goals. The first, in part I, is to analyze the construction of the female identity of the main character of the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston. Therefore, four chapters compose the first part of this work. In the first three, before the discussion, the text tries to bring the readers closer to the discussion still to come. In order to do this, these initial chapters aim to make the reader more familiar with the author, then with her work, and, last but not least, with the historical moment in the United States during the period of the African-American cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. The second goal is to analyze the translation of the novel, Seus Olhos Viam Deus, to Portuguese and, if possible, to make suggestions for the translation crossroads and obstacles that the translator might have faced. By doing this, this dissertation aims to present solutions that may be used in future translations to Brazilian Portuguese of works by African-American writers. Therefore, the parts II and III of this work, which are composed by three more chapters, bring a literary review about recent translation theories and, through an innovative perspective, detach a few points which are going to be subsequently discussed.