University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"""Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick"": Humor and the subversive in three novels by Zora Neale Hurston"

Levecq, Christine

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Description

Title
"""Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick"": Humor and the subversive in three novels by Zora Neale Hurston"
Author(s)
Levecq, Christine
Issue Date
1991
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Baym, Nina
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Black Studies
  • Folklore
  • Literature, American
Language
eng
Abstract
  • Zora Neale Hurston is a controversial figure, equally praised and criticized for her representation of African-Americans; while some critics emphasize her ebullience and celebration of Black culture, others call her fiction stereotypical and essentialist. Observing the workings of the recurrent humor in her works helps explode this critical binary opposition. Specifically, the carnivalesque and the heteroglossia often subvert essentialist notions of (Black) identity.
  • Jonah's Gourd Vine's protagonist, the preacher-womanizer John Pearson, can be seen as an African rather than an African-American trickster figure, i.e. as a mobile character whose liminality helps him fight essentialist definitions imposed on him by both the white establishment and his own community. Janie's romantic search for self-fulfillment in Their Eyes Were Watching God is undermined by the humor and the carnival, which emphasize her shifting and multiply defined identity. Finally, the African-Americanized story of Moses and the Hebrews shows the conflicts involved in their search for a unified national and cultural identity. In these three novels, Hurston appears as a subversive presence whose manipulation of humor underscores a complex political vision.
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/22809
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 1991 Levecq, Christine

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