Thesis

Literature & IT Review

My thesis, currently under the working title “Binaries, Images, & Symbols: The Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” aims to examine the depiction of Janie, the story’s heroine, as an (gendered) Other in her own narrative and to filter a scholarly understanding of the way Zora Neale Hurston authored Janie as an Other through the use binary images and symbols in Hurston’s text. I also propose to contextualise the novel, and Janie’s Otherness, in reference to Hurston’s own life experiences.

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Chapter One, page one, in my own copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God

For my thesis, my main text is Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). However, I also intend to look at other Hurston writings, specifically at her folklore collection Mules And Men (1935) and her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). I find her folklore collection useful to my thesis in that it also depicts certain animal images found in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston’s biography will be a practical source in order to glean details of her personal life from Hurston’s own point of view.

I will rely heavily on two collections of critical essays by Harold Bloom, both his Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston (1986) and also, Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ (1987). I will use several essays out of these collections, which look at a wide range of images, interpretations, and stigmas and terms attached to Hurston’s work overall. Of particular interest to me are essays that look at images/symbols in Their Eyes Were Watching God and/or look binary ideas contained in the novel, such as ideas of sexism and sexuality or communal spaces and private spaces which are addressed in Missy Dehn Kubitschek’s essay”‘Tuh de Horizon and Back’: The Female Quest in Their Eyes Were Watching God“–an essay in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. As another example of the types of work in these collections, Roger Rosenblatt’s essay in Modern Critical Views: Zora Neale Hurston, titled simply “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” looks at the Other to Self journey for Janie in the novel. At one point he says “she begins as a minor character in her own life story” (29). I’m extremely excited about this essay in particular, as the marginalisation of Janie as an Other in the novel will be part of my thesis. While most of these essays topically address Their Eyes Were Watching God, others address some of her lesser known works–such as, her folklore collections or her autobiography.

Robert E. Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1980) will also serve me well, in addition to Hurston’s own biography, as it examines the general reception of Hurston’s work during the Harlem Renaissance, reactions to Hurston herself, looks into influences on her writing style. For example, the chapter entitled “Ambiguities of Self, Politics of Race” discusses personal experiences like her brief and failed second marriage to Albert Prince III, who Hurston would later use as a type-and-shadow for Janie’s third husband in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Tea Cake. It also provides interesting insight into Hurston’s mid-life and late career, especially into her own doubts and depressions about the results of her life and writing career.

I am also using chapters out of The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1989). This work benefits my thesis because of its address on the idea of signification in African-American literature: “It presents a number of illustrative examples of Signifyin(g) in its several forms, then concludes by outlining selective examples of black intertextual relations” (Gates 98). As of now, I’m not certain how intertextuality will surface in my thesis, if at all, but for the sake of responsible scholarship, I think it bears looking into at least. This text also looks at Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a speakerly text and addresses literary devices Hurston used to narrate her novel.

Along with scholarship specific to Hurston and her work, I intend to look at a couple of theorists who were largely influential to the idea of the Self and the Other, since it plays a significant role in my thesis. I will look at Jacques Lacan’s work on the mirror stage, specifically using the chapters “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” and “On the Subject Who Is Finally in Question” out of the collection Ecrits: the first complete edition in English (2006). In simple terms, Lacan’s work suggests that the mirror stage is when children recognise themselves in relation to others for the first time, and it is at this point that they form an “I”–a sense of themselves as the Self or Subject.

Of course, I would be remise to address a gendered Self and Other without looking a feminist theory, so I will also rely on excerpts from Hélène Cixous’ “The Newly Born Woman” and her essay “Sorties” out of The Hélène Cixous Reader, edited by Susan Sellers (1994). In this ground breaking essay, Cixous used binary language to juxtapose terms such as Activity/Passivity, Culture/Nature, and Man set over Nature. These language binaries play into Cixous’ idea of l’ecriture feminine (feminine writing) and in her idea of the ways out of male centric authorship. Her essay will feature largely as I discuss Hurston’s use of binary images to create a Self and Other in Their Eyes Were Watching God and to also examine her  narrative techniques.

Beyond these print sources, I will use online databases, such as Academic Search Complete and JSTOR to access scholarly journals, articles, and other materials that I may need during the months I work on my thesis. Also, as I included in a previous blog post, there is a film documentary on Hurston by PBS which I may look into as supplementary research and to engage in a different medium of scholarship around this amazing author.

Reflections On Our Textualities’17 Mini-Conference

First off, I’m sorry for the delay in a reflective post about the mini-conference; however, after all the stress and exhaustion caused by preparation for, and even on, the conference day, I needed some distance.

After all was said and done though, the mini-conference was entirely enjoyable.

The Textualities’17 mini-conference was not my first nor my second academic conference. I’ve had the absolute pleasure and privilege of presenting at the annual international Sigma Tau Delta convention in the States. (You can actually go view the website for this year’s convention, if you want: http://www.englishconvention.org/2017/) However, UCC’s mini-conference was perhaps the most stressful academic conference I’ve attended. I think that’s part and parcel to the fact that we students organised and ran the conference, and that it’s presentation style was wildly different than what I’ve encountered before.

When preparing for Textualities’17, there were a couple of things I felt concerned about, as well as a couple of things I was excited for.

The conference was set up in six different panels throughout the day with breaks for lunch and coffee. Each panel had an assigned student who acted as the Chair to introduce presenters and facilitate the Q&A session following each panel. We also were told to live-Tweet about the conference and different panel throughout the day.

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An example of what my Twitter feed looked like on the conference day.

I can say with certainty, the prospect of live-Tweeting and, for some of us, live-blogging the conference was significantly less stressful than focusing on our own presentations.

Mainly, my concern–and I think most of my cohert’s–centered around the presentation style of the mini-conference: Pecha Kucha.

Pecha Kucha is a presentation style that prescribes a 20×20 formula. The 20×20 stands for using only twenty slides and spending only twenty seconds of the presentation on each slide; this makes for a presentation that lasts only 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The style also recommends that you don’t use text on your slides, and if you do, it recommends that you only use small amounts. Essentially, the idea is that you use images which will speak to the presentation you’re giving, but not act as the presentation. (If you’re interested in learning more about the Pecha Kucha style, you can follow this link to Pechakucha.org.)

The task of presenting on (what we hope will be) our thesis topics in such a short amount of time seemed incredibly daunting. However, I was also kind of excited about the presentation style, as well. The kind of forced concision that Pecha Kucha demands made me hopeful that it would bring into focus more of what I want to address in my thesis.

Update: it totally did!

My preparation for the Pecha Kucha presentation started out with me writing down long rambling sentences that vaguely addressed ideas of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a text on the Self and the Other. I had way too many ideas and not enough direction.

On the mini-conference day, after loads of practice, revision, more practice, and more revision, I actually had what I felt was a solid direction to move with in my research.

My thesis will focus on Hurston’s use of symbolism and binary images in the text to address the (gendered) Other. I will look at her work through the lens of French feminist theory, as well as the work of Jacques Lacan, and with attention to her personal life–so, looking at Hurston’s work in anthropology, her work with folklore collections, and also the social climate of the time when she was writing.

In my presentation, I tackled a brief history of Hurston and introduced her book to my fellow students and the faculty members in attendance. I also addressed the theorists (Jacques Lacan and Helene Cixous) I want to look at during my thesis process and outlined a few different reasons I’m interested in their work. After that, I felt it most effective to only look at one of the binary images I see in Their Eyes Were Watching God and use it as an example for my interest in the Other of Hurston’s work. For the presentation, I chose to focus on the image of the mule in Hurston’s work, binary to the image of the master.

After the presentation ended came the part I think we all dreaded most: the Q&A.

Of course, we definitely didn’t have reason to be so flustered. The questions we all received were lovely and, I think, we each answered intelligently.

All-in-all, the day was a great success and I’m proud of my third experience in an academic conference!

You are welcome to view my presentation slides through the Prezi website. However, do remember that the presentation slides are mostly images, so don’t be alarmed if you don’t exactly follow what the slides  represent.

 

Textualities ’17 Conference Live Blog: Panel 5

As we all have various jobs as participants of the Textualities ’17 conference, my task is live blogging. Thus follows the blog account for Panel 5 of the 2017 UCC School of English Textualities Conference.

Our lovely Lauren McAuliffe is acting chair. After she introduces everyone, Josephine Fenton presents first on Living Rooms & Enda Walsh.

Josephine says that the idea of a room in Walsh’s works is hugely important to the idea of his plays—not excluding the way a theatre acts as a dark room full of people staring at another smaller ‘room’ on stage.

She says: “The room in which the play is set is as important as the play.”

Her presentation surveys various staged of productions of Enda Walsh’s dramatic works, including: The New Electric Ballroom, The Kitchen, Arlington: Isla, The Walworth Farce, Disco Pigs, and Penelope.

Something which strikes me as interesting in her presentation is the idea of light and dark in the various rooms of his plays.

Performance spaces seem to influence the interpretation of his plays, and Walsh seems to intend that.

Josephine closes by saying that performance spaces seem to influence the interpretation of his plays, because “Rituals happen in specific places.”

Second in this panel is Lena Schulte, presenting on Ireland’s connections with Germany, partly due to her German nationality.

Her research looks at three German companies that moved to Ireland in the 1900s and the way that has influenced relations between Germany and Ireland.

An owner of one of the of three companies wrote a book which addressed Catholicism, travel, and culture, which influenced much of the perception of “similarity” between the countries and increased German immigration in Ireland.

Lena calls this the “trap of similarity;” a paradox that she say insinuates culturally similar countries in which it would be easier for immigrants to ignore cultural differences.

Her closing remarks include her desire to find out at what age German immigrants have, and continue to, come to Ireland and for specifically what reasons. Did they come as entrepreneurs? To work in established businesses? Why did they choose to bring their business? What age did they come to Ireland? Did they stay?

The panel’s third presenter, Patrick Gibbons, is looking at “Old Stories in a New Ireland.”

His current research focuses on the change between new and old Ireland, considering legal, artistic, diasporic, and several other elements.

After giving a brief history of events that caused “New Ireland” and also the dispersion of Irish citizens to America, Patrick states that the historiographical response to these events was to draw on (literary) works from the 17th and 18th century, rather than creating new works.

He shows this harkening back, if you will, was catered to by publishing companies in both Dublin and New York, causing these older texts to be readily available to a general public.

The ultimate effect of reviving these works this brought into question identity, both for Irish Americans of the diaspora and newly founded Irish Republic citizens.

Patrick asserts that the older Irish tales his research has considered in the 19th century and 20th century serve as a bridge to “Old Ireland.”

His closing remarks include a reminder that he has not nailed down a definite direction for his thesis; however, I find his research so far highly interesting.

Fourth and finally, our panel speaker is Rebecca Murray. Her presentation focuses on Reason and Sensibility.

She’s looking at the work of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft and at the transition from Reason to Sensibility.

She draws on the way in which Wollstonecraft influenced Godwin’s work and his transition from a man of reason to a man of sensibility. She says, “Wollstonecraft really understood knowledge alongside feeling.”

During the lives of both writers, society was undergoing a large amount of change. Godwin was writing when power was beginning to shift from Monarchy/aristocracy to general public, and this is reflected in his both his political and fictional writing.

Godwin seems to embody seems to embody the transition from a man of feeling to a man of theory. Rebecca will look at Godwin’s text Caleb Williams and Political Justice. Her Wollstonecraft texts are A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Letters from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. 

In her thesis, Rebecca would like to look at links between literary works and political works. According to her, Godwin believes that “Reason should reside in man’s own morality, not in institutional law.”

As at the end, of every Panel, our audience has the chance to participate in a Q&A session.