Zora Neale Hurston

Discussion Questions:

1.) Do you agree with the NAAL editors that the Eatonville Anthology vignettes printed here are “side-splitting” tales?  Why or why not?  Is there humor in any of her texts?  Is humor a relative term?  Are there different kinds of humor that she is using?

2.) The Eatonville Anthology excerpts and “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” are both nonfiction, autobiographical prose.  How does Hurston present herself and where she comes from?  Do you consider these presentations to be “problematic” for her, either at the time of composition and publication or now (today)?

3.) Some literary scholars say that “both the Anthology and the essay ‘How It Feels to Be Colored Me’ explore origins of consciousness -- both collective and individual -- that Hurston transforms into mythology, her attempt to explain the creation of the universe, to understand why the world is the way it is.”  What do you think of this claim?

4.) Some critics say of “The Gilded Six Bits” that Hurston “steers very close, perhaps dangerously so, to certain stereotypes that have been widely exploited over the years.”  Do you agree?  (What or where are the stereotypes the critics are referring to? What is Hurston doing with them? Playing along with them? Subverting them? Correcting them?)

5.) What kind of audience is “The Gilded Six-Bits” implicitly intended for and in what kind of political and moral context?  Does the story take unexpected turns -- not in plotting but in tone?  In what ways does Huston distinguish her own voice, her own perspective, from that of Missy May or Joe Banks?

6.) The NAAL editors say that Hurston “rejected the idea that a black writer’s chief concern should be how blacks were being portrayed to the white reader.  She did not write to ‘uplift her race,’ either; because in her view it was already uplifted, she (like Claude McKay) was not embarrassed to present her characters a mixtures of good and bad, strong and weak.”  What do you think of this approach?

7.) What are readers meant to take away from each of these three pieces -- themes, morals, messages, etc.?  From The Eatonville Anthology?  From “How It Feels to Be Colored Me”?  From “The Gilded Six-Bits”?  What did you take away from each of them?

8.) In what ways are these Hurston texts -- and, in fact, some of the other texts we’ve been reading -- considered to be “modern”?  Based on the texts we’ve read in this 1914-1945 “unit,” what is your working definition of “modernism”?