"Through different eyes": The aesthetics of community in the texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker
Abstract
Until the current decade, African-American women writers have been neglected, overlooked, disregarded, and trivialized because they have been judged by institutionalized aesthetic conventions that assume white and male-as-norm standards. Building on the scholarship of feminist and African-American women literary critics, the present study examines key assumptions and literary conventions in selected texts of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. In so doing, it identifies an Aesthetics of Community that connects these three twentieth-century writers. In establishing a genealogy of narrative conventions and concerns, the present study identifies a politics of gender which counters the traditional emphasis on the theme of racial conflict as the major motif in African-American literature. By joining a politics of race to a politics of gender, by celebrating and affirming African-American ancestors, heritage, experience, condition, and narrative strategies, by "unsilencing" the voices of African-American legacy, and by claiming a place in our literary culture, Hurston, Morrison, and Walker have contributed to the demise of the notion of a monolithic American "literature" as it has been traditionally conceived and constructed. Hurston originates the aesthetics of community by using a "folkloric ethos" to displace traditional male versions of African-American folktales, transferring the voice of the storyteller from men to women. Morrison, while providing fleeting glimpses of alternative "rooted" storytellers and legendary stories, primarily uses negative example to illustrate the destructive effects of the dominant culture's language constructs on African-American identity and art. Walker conjoins the concerns of Hurston and Morrison, positioning herself, as Morrison does, in a desolate present, while retrieving, as Hurston does, a viable past to create a future state of soundness, a viable, global community.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Oreovicz, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American literature|Black studies|Womens studies
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