DOCSLIB.ORG

6 Translation Analysis ……………………………………………………………………77

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
6 Translation Analysis ……………………………………………………………………77 MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God Translation and Analysis Master Thesis Brno 2009 Author: Lucie Laníková Supervisor: PhDr. Tamara Váňová Bibliografický záznam LANÍKOVÁ, Lucie. Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God - Translation and Analysis: master thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2009. 107 pages. The supervisor of the master thesis is PhDr. Tamara Váňová. Anotace Stěţejním úkolem magisterské práce nazvané „Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God - Translation and Analysis“ je český překlad prvních tří kapitol románu afro-americké autorky Zory Neale Hurstonové Their Eyes were Watching God a jeho následná analýza. Práce dále v kapitolách věnovaných teorii pojednává o překládání příznakového jazyka, především afroamerické angličtiny, tradici pouţívání dialektu v dílech amerických autorů a jeho zachycení v českých překladech, kapitola s názvem Translation analysis se potom zabývá problémy a potíţemi, které se při překladu objevily. Annotation The primary objective of the master thesis “Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching - Translation and Analysis“ is a Czech translation of the first three chapters of the novel written by an African-American author Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God and its subsequent analysis. Further, the translation of non-standard language varieties, particularly the translation of the African American Vernacular English, the tradition of the use of dialect in American works and its rendition in Czech translations are dealt with in the theoretical chapters, problems and difficulties of the translation are discussed in the chapter called Translation analysis. 2 Klíčová slova Zora Neale Hurstonová, Their Eyes Were Watching God, afro-americká angličtina, dialekt, tradice, překlad, teorie překladu, analýza Keywords Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, African-American Vernacular English, dialect, tradition, translation, translation theory, analysis 3 Declaration I declare that I wrote this master thesis on my own and all the materials used are stated in the bibliography. I agree with the placing of this thesis in the Library of the Faculty of Education at the Masaryk University and with the access for academic purposes. Brno, December 10 2009 Lucie Laníková .............................................. 4 Acknowledgement In the first place, I would like to thank heartily to my supervisor PhDr. Tamara Váňová for her helpful comments, advice and suggestions while I was writing the thesis. Secondly, my thanks are to all the amateur readers, especially to my mother, Lenka Laníková, who helped me with their remarks on the translation. Thirdly, I thank my native speaker consultant, Robert Johnson Rogers, M.A. for explanation and demonstration of problematic expressions and finally my thanks are to all those who supported me in any way while I was working on the thesis. 5 Table of Contents Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………..9 1 Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God ……………………………12 1.1 Zora Neale Hurston‟s Life ………………………………………………………….12 1.1.1 List of Zora Neale Hurston‟s published books ………………………………..13 1.1.1.1 Their Eyes Were Watching God ………………………………………..14 2 Perspectives on translation …………………………………………………………….16 2.1 What is translation? ………………………………………………………………...16 3 Translation of non-standard language varieties ……………………………………...19 3.1 Translating African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ………………………21 3.1.1 Translating African American Vernacular English into Czech ……………….23 4 Tradition of African American Vernacular English in American literary works and dealing with the translation of dialect into Czech …………………………………..25 4.1 Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin ……………………………………….25 4.2 Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ………………………………..28 4.3 Langston Hughes: The Best of Simple and Ku Klux ………………………………..29 4.4 Richard Wright: Native Son ………………………………………………………...31 4.5 John Oliver Killens: And Then We Heard the Thunder ……………………………32 4.6 Ishmael Reed: Flight to Canada ……………………………………………………33 4.7 Alice Walker: The Color Purple …………………………………………………...34 4.8 Toni Morrison: Beloved …………………………………………………………….35 4.9 Octavia E. Butler: Wild Seed and Dawn ……………………………………………36 6 4.10 Barbara Neely: Blanche among the Talented Tenth ………………………………36 5 The translation of the first three chapters from the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston …………………………………………………………38 6 Translation analysis ……………………………………………………………………77 6.1 Style of Their Eyes Were Watching God …………………………………………..77 6.1.1 Style of my translation ………………………………………………………...78 6.1.1.1 Rendition of the white mistress‟s speech in Czech …………………….80 6.1.1.2 Tense changes in English ………………………………………………82 6.1.1.3 Punctuation in a part of direct speech ………………………………….82 6.2 Translation of proper names ……………………………………………………….83 6.2.1 Translation of “Nanny” …………………………………………………….....83 6.3 Understanding of a text ………………………………………………………….....84 6.3.1 Understanding individual words but not in context …………………………...84 6.3.2 Difficulty with Czech expressions ………………………………………….....84 6.3.2.1 Personal difficulty with Czech expressions ………………………….....87 6.3.3 Specific terms ……………………………………………………………........88 6.3.4 Different linguistic and paralinguistic experience ………………………….....88 6.3.4 1 Omitting information …………………………………………………...89 6.3.4.2 Adding information ………………………………………………….....90 6.3.4.3 Analogy ………………………………………………………………...90 6.3.5 The relation of a thought and an expression ………………………………......92 6.3.6 Rendering metaphorical expressions ……………………………………….....93 6.3.7 Ambiguity in the text ……………………………………………………….....94 6.4 Neologisms …………………………………………………………………………95 6.5 Up-to-date non-standard expressions ………………………………………………96 7 6.6 „Unfindable‟ words …………………………………………………………………97 6.7 Amateur readers‟ perception of the translation of Their Eyes Were Watching God………………………………………………………………………………………99 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………102 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………….103 8 Introduction When I was to choose the topic of my bachelor thesis I was rather helpless and therefore peeked at topics that were suggested by the English department. Even though I did not want to write a literary thesis, one woman author caught my eye. At the time, I did not know that Zora Neale Hurston was such an established American writer. I had not heard about her before so I immediately started to do a little research in order to find out more information about her. After some investigation, I was surprised to discover that she was an important African-American author of the beginning of the twentieth century, a member of a literary, cultural and social movement called Harlem Renaissance, who was very famous at the beginning of her career but who felt into oblivion and died completely forgotten. I felt embarrased because of the lack of knowledge and decided to dedicate my bachelor thesis to the investigation of her life as well as to the cognition of the African-American history, tradition and culture. Throughout the whole investigating and writing process I was constantly remembering a respectable and honorable black woman, Tyjuana Thomas, I briefly encountered and who I will never forget for her attitude to life. When collecting sources for my bachelor thesis, I naturally came across Hurston‟s most acclaimed as well as discussed work Their Eyes Were Watching God published in 1937 and after reading it I tried to find its Czech translation. Not entirely surprised, I realized that there has not been a Czech translation of the book. I let it be for a while and when I started to think about the topic for my diploma thesis, I swiftly remembered the book and my supervisor of the bachelor thesis, Rita Collins, who had mentioned that a translation of the book could be a good idea for me for the future. Since then I did not consider working on anything else but translation for my master thesis. I wanted Czech people to know about this author and her most famous work. I was a bit worried about being able to translate as I had not had much experience with translating but I was told that I can do a translation thesis even if I am not an experienced translator. 9 I gathered books, enrolled in the translation seminars and hoped to get better before I started to work on the translation. There was one moment when I panicked. It was just before submitting the topic to the information system when my teacher, Martin Němec, I thought I was going to consult my thesis with, told me that he could not be my supervisor as he already had too many students. I was desperate and my “dream almost changed into a nightmare“. I had no idea what to do because doing a translation thesis was a sort of a package deal for me. Fortunately, he advised me to contact another teacher, Tamara Váňová, who agreed to be the supervisor of my diploma thesis. I am very thankful to her for the opportunity. At the very beginning I was told that the translation I had chosen was rather difficult and I did not know how to interpret it but once I started translating, I completely understood. Even though Their Eyes Were Watching God is, in my opinion, an amazing book, translating it is very different from just reading it. As a reader I understood the story without knowing every single word, however, in translation, details mattered much more. I found out that some expressions are impossible to find anywhere or if found they make no sense in context. I had quite a problem with finding a correct and commonly used Czech expression of an English utterance. Nevertheless, in spite of all the troubles and hours spent on it, I am very glad that I attempeted to tackle the translation. It was very creative and I enjoyed working on it most of the time. I sometimes got desperate and thought I was going to change the book and translate something else, something easier, but a few minutes, hours or days later I could not help myself and I had to get back to it and as a matter of fact many times I was successful to come up with new and better ideas.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Sweat: the Exodus from Physical and Mental Enslavement to Emotional and Spiritual Liberation
    University of Central Florida STARS Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 2007 Sweat: The Exodus From Physical And Mental Enslavement To Emotional And Spiritual Liberation Aqueelah Roberson University of Central Florida Part of the Theatre and Performance Studies Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Masters Thesis (Open Access) is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019 by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact STARS@ucf.edu. STARS Citation Roberson, Aqueelah, "Sweat: The Exodus From Physical And Mental Enslavement To Emotional And Spiritual Liberation" (2007). Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2004-2019. 3319. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/3319 SWEAT: THE EXODUS FROM PHYSICAL AND MENTAL ENSLAVEMENT TO EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL LIBERATION by AQUEELAH KHALILAH ROBERSON B.A., North Carolina Central University, 2004 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in the Department of Theatre in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Spring Term 2007 © 2007 Aqueelah Khalilah Roberson ii ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to showcase the importance of God-inspired Theatre and to manifest the transformative effects of living in accordance to the Word of God. In order to share my vision for theatre such as this, I will examine the biblical elements in Zora Neale Hurston’s short story Sweat (1926). I will write a stage adaptation of the story, while placing emphasis on the biblical lessons that can be used for God-inspired Theatre.
    [Show full text]
  • Zora Neale Hurston Daryl Cumber Dance University of Richmond, Ddance2@Richmond.Edu
    University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository English Faculty Publications English 1983 Zora Neale Hurston Daryl Cumber Dance University of Richmond, ddance2@richmond.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/english-faculty-publications Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, Caribbean Languages and Societies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Dance, Daryl Cumber. "Zora Neale Hurston." In American Women Writers: Bibliographical Essays, edited by Maurice Duke, Jackson R. Bryer, and M. Thomas Inge, 321-51. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu. 12 DARYL C. DANCE Zora Neale Hurston She was flamboyant and yet vulnerable, self-centered and yet kind, a Republican conservative and yet an early black nationalist. Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977 There is certainly no more controversial figure in American literature than Zora Neale Hurston. Even the most common details, easily ascertainable for most people, have been variously interpreted or have remained un­ resolved issues in her case: When was she born? Was her name spelled Neal, Neale, or Neil? Whom did she marry? How many times was she married? What happened to her after she wrote Seraph on the Suwanee? Even so immediately observable a physical quality as her complexion sparks con­ troversy, as is illustrated by Mary Helen Washington in "Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman Half in Shadow," Introduction to I Love Myself When I Am Laughing .
    [Show full text]
  • Zora Neale Hurston 1891-1960 Early Life She Was Born January 7, 1891
    Zora Neale Hurston 1891-1960 Early Life She was born January 7, 1891 in Alabama, the fifth of eight children. She moved with her family to Eatonville, FL when she was still a toddler. Eatonville, established in 1887, was a rural community near Orlando. It was the nation’s first incorporated black township, founded and governed by blacks. Father – John Hurston, served as mayor of Eatonville for three terms. He as a preacher and a carpenter. Mother – Lucy Potts Hurston, was a church director and former teacher. Because Zora grew up in Eatonville, she was never indoctrinated in inferiority. She could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. Zora had many clashes with her father. However, her mother was very encouraging. She would tell Zora, “Show your shine, jump at the sun, never say never.” But she died when Zora was only 13. Her father remarried Quickly, a woman much younger than he was. She and Zora didn’t get along. They even got into a fistfight. Zora then left Eatonville and spent the next years working a series of menial jobs, including one as a manicurist. She ended up in Baltimore in 1917 when she was 26. She had never finished high school, so she lied and said she was 16 in order to qualify for free public schooling. She never added those ten years back to her life. She attended Howard University, and published her first story in 1921, “John Redding Goes to Sea,” in Howard’s literary magazine, The Stylus. She continued to publish stories, and her work caught the eye of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, writers involved in the Harlem Renaissance, a movement in the 1920s to celebrate and express pride in their race.
    [Show full text]
  • Making a Way out of No Way: Zora
    ABSTRACT “‘Making a Way Out of No Way’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Hidden Discourse of Resistance” explores how Hurston used techniques she derived from the trickster tradition of African American folk culture in her narratives in order to resist and undermine the racism of the dominant discourse found in popular literature published during her lifetime. Critics have condemned her perceived willingness to use racist stereotypes in her work in order to pander to a white reading audience. This project asserts that Hurston did, indeed, don a “mask of minstrelsy” to play into her reading public’s often racist expectations in order to succeed as an academic and as a creative writer. At the same time, however, she crafted her narratives in a way that destabilized those expectations through use of sometimes subtle and sometimes blatant points of resistance. In this way, she was able to participate in a system that was rigged against her, as a woman and as an African American, by playing into the expectations of her audiences for economic and professional advantages while simultaneously undermining aspects of those expectations through rhetorical “winks,” exaggeration, sarcasm, and other forms of humor that enabled her to stay true to her personal values. While other scholars have examined Hurston’s discourse of resistance, this project takes a different approach by placing Hurston’s material in relation to the publishing climate at the time. Chapter One examines Mules and Men in the context of the revisions Hurston made to her scholarly work to transform her collection of folktales into a cohesive book marketed to a popular reading audience.
    [Show full text]
  • Oslica 1 Amy Oslica English 4995 Race, Class, Gender
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Missouri: MOspace Oslica 1 Amy Oslica English 4995 Race, Class, Gender & Property in Women’s Writing of the Harlem Renaissance By the 1920s, although slavery had been abolished in America decades before, many social, economic and legal inequalities remained between whites and blacks. This is well-known United States history, although to many, it still exists as a rather vague idea, all too easily over-looked, as the injustices are hard to personalize. Many black women writers in American history strived to bridge this gap by providing stories of black women whose life stories were deeply impacted by all of the types of inequalities that existed. Two of the most well known of these authors are Zora Neale Hurston and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These women, with their similarities and differences, put a face to the modern black woman through their story telling. Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God , as well as her two short stories, “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six-Bits,” provide an interesting comparison to Fauset’s novel The Chinaberry Tree and her short story “Emmy.” In order to make assumptions about the authors and their works, it is important to understand their backgrounds and personal histories. Hurston and Fauset’s personal stories add to the uniqueness of their works and greatly influenced them. As Sharon Jones wrote: Not only does their work reveal the complexities of tripartite race, class and gender relations, but their lives and the challenges they faced as writers all call attention to the double jeopardy of being black and female in pre-Civil Rights Movement America as they forged ahead in their desire to rewrite the American literary landscape” (2).
    [Show full text]
  • Harold Bloom (Editor)-Zora Neale Hurston (Blooms Modern Critical
    Bloom’s Modern Critical Views African American Samuel Taylor John Keats Poets: Coleridge Jamaica Kincaid Wheatley–Tolson Joseph Conrad Stephen King African American Contemporary Poets Rudyard Kipling Poets: Julio Cortázar Milan Kundera Hayden–Dove Stephen Crane Tony Kushner Edward Albee Daniel Defoe Ursula K. Le Guin Dante Alighieri Don DeLillo Doris Lessing Isabel Allende Charles Dickens C. S. Lewis American and Emily Dickinson Sinclair Lewis Canadian Women E. L. Doctorow Norman Mailer Poets, John Donne and the Bernard Malamud 1930–present 17th-Century Poets David Mamet American Women Fyodor Dostoevsky Christopher Poets, 1650–1950 W. E. B. DuBois Marlowe Hans Christian George Eliot Gabriel García Andersen T. S. Eliot Márquez Maya Angelou Ralph Ellison Cormac McCarthy Asian-American Ralph Waldo Emerson Carson McCullers Writers William Faulkner Herman Melville Margaret Atwood F. Scott Fitzgerald Arthur Miller Jane Austen Sigmund Freud John Milton Paul Auster Robert Frost Molière James Baldwin William Gaddis Toni Morrison Honoré de Balzac Johann Wolfgang Native-American Samuel Beckett von Goethe Writers The Bible George Gordon, Joyce Carol Oates William Blake Lord Byron Flannery O’Connor Jorge Luis Borges Graham Greene George Orwell Ray Bradbury Thomas Hardy Octavio Paz The Brontës Nathaniel Hawthorne Sylvia Plath Gwendolyn Brooks Robert Hayden Edgar Allan Poe Elizabeth Barrett Ernest Hemingway Katherine Anne Browning Hermann Hesse Porter Robert Browning Hispanic-American Marcel Proust Italo Calvino Writers Thomas Pynchon Albert Camus Homer Philip Roth Truman Capote Langston Hughes Salman Rushdie Lewis Carroll Zora Neale Hurston J. D. Salinger Miguel de Cervantes Aldous Huxley José Saramago Geoffrey Chaucer Henrik Ibsen Jean-Paul Sartre Anton Chekhov John Irving William Shakespeare G.
    [Show full text]
  • The Landscapes of African American Short Stories, 1887 – 2014 By
    The Landscapes of African American Short Stories, 1887 – 2014 By Kenton Rambsy Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson, Maryemma Graham ________________________________ William J. Harris ________________________________ Mary Jo Reiff ________________________________ Tony Bolden ________________________________ Randal Jelks Date Defended: April 14, 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Kenton Rambsy certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Mapping African American Short Stories, 1899- 2014 ________________________________ Chairperson Maryemma Graham Date approved: May 8, 2015 ii Abstract: My dissertation addresses the dearth of scholarship on short stories by using quantitative data and text-mining software to explain how the repeated inclusion of short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Edward P. Jones in anthologies across decades shapes the contours of African American literary tradition. My research also reveals why specific geographic locations have become, over time, fundamental to the study of African American literature. iii Acknowledgements: My parents have been pillars of support throughout my entire life, but especially during my graduate school career. For that, I thank them for always pushing me to my limits in intellectual thought. My siblings, my brother, sister, and sister-in-law, have all been role models and social guides along my academic journey. Thank you for always inspiring me by example. My extended family and close friends (past and present) have been beneficial to academic success by offering me encouragement or helping me work through complex ideas.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 1 Life
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-67095-1 - The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston Lovalerie King Excerpt More information Chapter 1 Life Born under the sign of Capricorn on January 7, 1891 in Notasulga, Alabama, Zora Neale Hurston was the sixth child and second daughter of John Hurston (1861–1918) and Lucy Ann Potts Hurston (1865–1904). Hurston’s biographers tell us that her name was recorded in the family bible as Zora Neal Lee Hurston; at some point an “e” was added to “Neal” and “Lee” was dropped. Though she was born in Notasulga, Hurston always called Eatonville, Florida, home and even – though perhaps unwittingly, because her family relocated to Eatonville when Zora was quite young – named it as her birthplace in her autobiography. Eatonville has become famous for its long association with Hurston; since 1991 it has been the site of the annual multi-disciplinary Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (ZORA! Festival), which lasts for several days. The festival’s broad objective is to call attention to contributions that Africa- derived persons have made to world culture; however, its narrower objective is to celebrate Hurston’s life and work along with Eatonville’s unique cultural history. Hurston’s family moved to Eatonville in 1893. Her father, John Hurston, was the eldest of nine children in an impoverished sharecropper family near Notasulga; during his lifetime, he would achieve substantial influence in and around Eatonville as a minister, carpenter, successful family man, and local politician. His parents, Alfred and Amy Hurston, were, like wife Lucy’s parents, Sarah and Richard Potts, formerly enslaved persons.
    [Show full text]
  • Familial Characterization in Zora Neale Hurston's Spunk
    2011 International Conference on Languages, Literature and Linguistics IPEDR vol.26 (2011) © (2011) IACSIT Press, Singapore Familial Characterization in Zora Neale Hurston's Spunk Fatemeh Azizmohammadi1 and Nasser Mahmoudi 2 1Department of English Literature, Arak Branch, Islamic Azad University, Arak, Iran 2Department of Persian Literature, Shoushtar Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shoushtar, Iran Abstract: Hurston's motives for presenting black folklore were, in part, political. She wanted to refute contemporary claims that African Americans lacked a distinct culture of their own. Her novels depict the unconscious creativity of the African American proletariat or folk. They represent community members participating in a highly expressive communication system which taught them to survive racial oppression and, moreover, to respect themselves and their community. Hurston also had a psychological motive for presenting black folk culture. She drew the folk materials for her literary works from the rural, southern black life she knew as a child and subsequently recorded in folklore-collecting trips in the late 1920's and 1930's. She had fond memories of her childhood in the all-black town of Eatonville, where she did not experience poverty or racism. This Study attempts to examine familiar characterization. The stories selected for study here ' are from the book entitled Spunk. They are Spunk, Isis, Muttsy, Sweet, and The Gilded Six Bits. Keywords: Familiar Characterization, Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk, Isis, Muttsy, Sweet, the Gilded Six Bits 1. Introduction In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the short story as a genre passed through various stages of evolution. French, German and Russian influences helped center the focus of the socio-realistic portrayal of characters.
    [Show full text]
  • Zora Neale Hurtson Early Life
    Zora Neale Hurtson Early Life Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston. Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church. Her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns to be incorporated in the United States, when she was three. Hurston said she always felt that Eatonville was "home" to her and sometimes claimed it as her birthplace. Early Life Her father later became mayor of the town, which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Hurston a number of books that opened her mind to literature, and this may be why she sometimes describes her "birth" as taking place in that year. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me". Early Life In 1904, Hurston's mother died and her father remarried, to Matte Moge, almost immediately, considered something of a minor scandal as it was rumored he had relations with Moge before Lucy died. Hurston's father and new stepmother sent her away to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but they eventually stopped paying her tuition and the school expelled her.
    [Show full text]
  • The Reality of Fiction: Diagnosing White Culture Through the Lens of Mother/Nature in Zora Neale Hurston’S Seraph on the Suwanee
    THE REALITY OF FICTION: DIAGNOSING WHITE CULTURE THROUGH THE LENS OF MOTHER/NATURE IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S SERAPH ON THE SUWANEE by Rita C. Butler A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 2008 Copyright by Rita C. Butler 2008 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to Dr. Kit Johnson for her continued interest and support as well as her willingness to share professional knowledge of personality disorders. I am also grateful to Dr. Jane Caputi and Dr. Susan L. Brown for agreeing to take on the extra work involved in this type of project and their insightful suggestions. Thanks are also due to my son, Jeffrey, who was willing to be drawn into the special world that Hurston represents and offer meaningful comments and observations. I want to especially extend my thanks to Dr. Johnnie Stover who was willing to take on the task of Committee Chair despite an already heavy work schedule and whose patience, helpful comments, and unfailing encouragement kept me on track. iv ABSTRACT Author: Rita C. Butler Title: The Reality of Fiction: Diagnosing White Culture Through The Lens of Mother/Nature in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee Institution: Florida Atlantic University Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Johnnie M. Stover Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Year: 2008 Zora Neale Hurston’s last published novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, can be read as a sociopolitical critique of what she once referred to as the false foundation of Anglo- Saxon civilization.
    [Show full text]
  • Zora Neale Hurston's Experimentation with the Narrative Voice in Her Short Stories
    ZORA NEALE HURSTON'S EXPERIMENTATION WITH THE NARRATIVE VOICE IN HER SHORT STORIES ANA MARÍA FRAILE Universidad de Salamanca (Abstract) Literary critics such as Henry Louis Gates and Barbara Johnson have already approached the issue of voice in Zora Neale Hurston's novels-especially in Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, little attention has been directed to her short stories, despite the fact that they constitute an excellent ground to study the evolution of her narrative technique when considered chronologically. This paper responds to the need to flll that gap. I will show that between 1921 and 1942 Hurston créales successive narrative voices whose difterentiating trait is the gradual approach to and eventual identification with the language of the folk. In doing so Hurston demonstrated that it was viable for the Afro-American writer to acknowledge the folkloric oral tradition as the foundation of a genuine Afro-American written tradition. The representation of the Black voice in literature has always been a topic of debate among Afro-American writers. At the beginning of the twentieth century the stance in favor of the assimilation of black culture to white culture in order to work out the differences between blacks and whites —supported by Booker T. Washington, for instance- gave way to a new attitude in the early I920s. Afro-Americans began to think in more positive terms about the past and there was a re-evaluation of their roots. The Hariem Renaissance artists, at the same time echoing and voicing this popular change in attitude, looked back at their origins and discovered the richness of black folklore and language.' Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown, among others, considered these as irrefutable proofs of the artistic and intelligent spirit of the race.
    [Show full text]