Se
Hurston:
ding
In his essay "Zora Neale Hurston: 'A Negro Way of Speaking." Henry Louis Gates Jr. says of
otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image- and myth-making that rescued so many
black writers from remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a more or less harmonious
but nevertheless problematic unity of opposites. It
is this
complexity that refuses to lend
by the Black Arts in
itself to the glib categories of 'radical
' or '
conservative; 'black' or '
Negro
, '
revolutionary
or 'Uncle Tom'-
categories of little use in
literary criticism. It is this
same complexity,
embodied in her fiction,
that, until Alice
Walker published
her important essay ("In Search
of Zora Neale Hurston"
) in Ms.
magazine in 1975, had made
Hurston's place in black
literary history an ambiguous one at
best.
7. With a small group, discuss and analyze Gates's interpretation of Hurston's contribution to
black literary history. Discuss what evidence he
provides for his interpretation and its validity.