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Baym, Nina Levecq, Christine 2011-05-07T13:52:11Z 2011-05-07T13:52:11Z 10000-01-01 1991 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. Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-07T13:52:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 4922 bytes, checksum: 910b249b4beec47e7ab768910c8f966f (MD5) 9210889.pdf: 7804552 bytes, checksum: f767a8bfecea203fc40b3751bc38c391 (MD5) Previous issue date: 1991 Item marked as restricted to the 'UIUC Users [automated]' Group (id=2) by Howard Ding (hding2@illinois.edu) on 2011-05-07T15:00:09Z Item is restricted indefinitely. Restriction data tranferred 2014-07-01T11:28:26-05:00 Original Data Group with Access UIUC Users [automated] Release Date: none Reason: ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission ETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permission U of I Only AAI9210889 (UMI)AAI9210889 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/22809 eng Copyright 1991 Levecq, Christine Black Studies Folklore Literature, American """Hitting a straight lick with a crooked stick"": Humor and the subversive in three novels by Zora Neale Hurston" text English English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.