Related Papers
Prison Life Writing, African American Narrative Strategies, and Bad: The Autobiography of James Carr
Simon Rolston
"'The Lion's Part': Some Afro-Elizabethan Compatibilities".
1994 •
Thomas Pettitt
"Play it cool, and dig all jive": The Influence of the Black Oral Tradition on Zorah Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes
Willem van Amerongen
In this thesis, I researched in what ways the black oral tradition appears in literature. In order to reach to a conclusion, literary works of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were scrutinized. According to historians Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Houston Baker Jr., these two authors in particularly are important, because they formally experimented with one of the most expressive artistic forms in African-American culture, the blues. For this reason, special attention was given to evaluating in what ways African-American oral tradition appears in traditional blues lyrics, and in the performance of this music.
Global Journal of Human-Social Science Research
A View of Dialect and Folklore in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
2014 •
Serir Ilhem
After long been rejected by harsh criticism, Alice Walker brings back credit to Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, about a black heroine. Species from the south folklore is portrayed in black dialect echoing traditional literary voice. Our paper targets to analyse the linguistic and cultural diversity in the novel noticed between black dialect and Standard English of the narrator; plus an exposition to folkloric elements spelled out of the Southern black culture accurately reported by the novelist through Janie whose voice represents the actual situation of everyday life. Hurston, as most urban and rural African American writers, defies canonical literature and conventional literary representation; indeed, she succeeds to develop the skill of reproducing the ritualized vernacular contest, stories, games, entertainment and other popular habits. Grounded in a theory of cultural oral legacy, Hurston’s novel is duplication of the black culture and dialect which hav...
ZORA NEALE HURSTON, " THE BONE COLLECTOR " OF HARLEM RENAISSANCE: THE HORIZON BUILT ON BONES
Dilek ONDER
The Harlem Renaissance was a crucial era when black intelligentsia had an opportunity for a true representation of blacks, which led a dramatic shift in the perception of black identity along with an influx of new and divergent ideas. “The New Negro” promoted folk culture and tried to accurately reflect black folk life in their works counter to the stereotypes in whites’ works; however, their artistic endeavors in representing blacks in literature resulted in contention among the black intellectuals. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes agreed to collaborate on a play called Mule Bone, A Negro Folk Comedy to reflect the accurate depiction of black folk life in black drama cloaked with elaborated and figurative black imagery; however, they were not able to publish it as co-writers due to the disagreement between. As a result, Hurston decided to write her own version of “Negro comedy” which she called De Turkey and De Law: A Comedy in Three Acts. In my paper, I will compare both plays in order to offer an analysis of how Hurston prefers to depict black folks culture in a black literary material and how salient is the black folk culture in her own version as it is in her other works. She set a horizon to depict real black folks with black folk expressions that were carried over and revived in a new form in the New World from the bones of African heritage. Although Hurston and Hughes had a similar approach to African Heritage, Hurston’s works differ from Hughes’s works in terms of the way and amount of use of black folk materials. Contrary to the leaders whose narrations were bleached with white norms, she made the best of her talent and folklore knowledge. She was convinced that the only thing would light the way to the literary horizon was folk culture, revived on the bones, or remains, of the collective African heritage. Creating works based on black folk culture was her response to the prevailing literary horizon and the realization of her own Truth that she would never give up. She was such a bone collector, who built a literary tradition on bones of her ancestors.
African dance as cultural memory in African American women's writing
2012 •
Ondra Dismukes
The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities, HUMANITIES 2018, 7(1), 17; doi:10.3390/h7010017. http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/1/17
Simon Bronner
s: American Folklore consists of traditional knowledge and cultural practices engaged by inhabitants of the United States below Canada and above Mexico. American folklorists were influenced by nineteenth-century European humanistic scholarship that identified in traditional stories, songs, and speech among lower class peasants an artistic quality and claim to cultural nationalism. The United States, however, appeared to lack a peasant class and shared racial and ethnic stock associated in European perceptions with the production of folklore. The United States was a relatively young nation, compared to the ancient legacies of European kingdoms, and geographically the country's boundaries had moved since its inception to include an assortment of landscapes and peoples. Popularly, folklore in the United States is rhetorically used to refer to the veracity, and significance, of cultural knowledge in an uncertain, rapidly changing, individualistic society. It frequently refers to the expressions of this knowledge in story, song, speech, custom, and craft as meaningful for what it conveys and enacts about tradition in a future-oriented country. The essay provides the argument that folklore studies in the United States challenge Euro-centered humanistic legacies by emphasizing patterns associated with the American experience that are (1) democratic, (2) vernacular, and (3) incipient.
TFH: The Journal of History and Folklore
"He is the Story that All Weak People Create to Compensate for their Weakness". African American Women Writing Folklore for the Federal Writers' Project
2023 •
Kathi King
The 1930s, shaped by the hardships brought on by the Great De-pression, were also a time when folklore collecting was institution-alized. Anthropologists and ethnographers, who had developed new tools and perspectives to document culture and history in the 1920s, slipped into positions the New Deal had opened for officials and di-rectors in the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), which was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Their aim was to re-write American history to give new self-respect and -understanding to a na-tion struggling with the effects of dramatic economic changes. They collected narratives of “ordinary people,” wanting to do justice to the diversity of American society. Oral and cultural history methods were at the center of their practice. The FWP also funded local and regional projects devoted to the documentation of Black culture and history, often carried out by units of Black writers, and interviewed about 2,300 ex-slaves. African American writers belonged to the group hit hardest by the economic collapse. Among them were three women writers: Margaret Walker, Dorothy West, and Zora Neale Hurston. These women conducted interviews, collected folklore, wrote and edited manuscripts, and used both their time in and material from the FWP for their own fiction. In this way, narratives of Black female subjectivity made it into literature and history, with women writing Black female voices and heroines into the historical narrative of the United States by revising, transforming, and subverting traditional codes and genres. Margaret Walker’s folk ballad “Yalluh Hammuh” can be seen as such a venture. It also exemplifies the interplay of per- sonal memory, folklore, and poetry. An examination of the use of oral history and folklore in the New Deal era, with a focus on the voices and roles of African American women, can help us better understand the nexus of “race,” class, and gender within literature, poetry, and historiography.
Chapter -4 Their Eyes Were Watching God: Pursuit of Happiness
Priya Bose
Humanities
The Challenge of American Folklore to the Humanities
Simon Bronner
