Week 8

      Today we will look at the style of Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), whose work is characterized by poetic, figurative embellishments and the vernacular voicings of her characters. We leave the spare style of Ernest Hemingway, which we examined last week in the story "Hills Like White Elephants," with its focus on an "American" male and his (presumably) European girlfriend, as they sit for drinks while waiting for the arrival of a train, and obliquely discuss the matter of a "simple" operation that will take care of what will otherwise be a game-changer to their relationship.  In the story, the particular operation goes unnamed, but from hints we can assume a surgical abortion, a procedure illegal at the time the story was set and published, the 1920s.  Much lies below, is subtextual, in the work of Hemingway and requires the reader use his or her wits and imagination to suss it all out. We have to read, look and listen closely.  This is always true with literature, but the minimalist style leaves out much of the exposition and narrative guidance we might ordinarily expect. The American's female companion appears agitated, conflicted, resistant to his repeated assurances that the operation will be simple and solve everything.  At one point, she looks out over a full-featured landscape of trees, river, mountains, and clouds and remarks that they could have it all, but for the fact of what his proposal means. Instead, they might presumably go on traveling from one spot to another, one hotel to another, never settling, as perhaps she wishes, never committing.  We must interpret.  That she "is fine" as the story ends, seems doubtful, for her tone and behavior suggest otherwise.

      Hurston's personal story is remarkable.  She grew up in the first all-black incorporated town in the U.S., in Eatonville, Florida, near Orlando. Her father was the local preacher and her mother had a hand in the local curriculum and advised her children to "jump at de sun."  Being insulated from the racism prevalent in mixed race communities meant a certain freedom and joy and pride in being African American that comes out in her writings, which in so many ways document and celebrate the rich diversity of African American life.  At the age of 26 she pretended to be 16 in order to complete her high school degree and thereafter attended several colleges and universities, in particular Columbia University, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boaz, an early leader in the field.  Her work–short stories, folktales, novels, plays, memoir, essays–often reflects the field studies she undertook to gather material on the distinct cultures of different communities in the American south and the Caribbean. She is associated with that flourishing of African American artistic life and culture known as the Harlem Renaissance, which from about 1918 to the early 1930s drew together writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen and forged a stronger sense of identity and possibility for African Americans.

  We will also examine "The Found Boat," by Canadian author Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013 for being a master of the short story form.  She grew up in Ontario, an area resembling the American Midwest, on a fox and mink farm, and later moved west with her husband.  Rural Huron County, Ontario, provides the setting model for many of her early stories. Her style is straightforward and simple and often features the moment of epiphany in which a great revelation is to be had;  many of her early stories also focus on a young girl making her way in the world, fighting to be herself as against entrenched mores and traditions.



Homework:  Read "Puppy," by George Saunders, and "Summer," by David Updike.

                       Compose Final Project.