The horizon rising above Zora Neale Hurston’s works

Abstract

Zora Neale Hurston the prominent writer of the Harlem Renaissance has led the way for the future writers of black letters in terms of representing blacks in literature. This doctoral thesis is aiming at exploring how Zora Neale Hurston sets a horizon which constitutes her aim to represent the black identity within the metaphorical “contact zone” where white discourse and black discourse meet and originates a “resistant text.” in her works she mines the rich vein of black folk culture and folk expressions to a very great degree and designates the effort to represent folk culture in a new aesthetic standard as her artistic horizon. She advocates using folk material without any alteration and feels that the collective African heritage should be the main tool for a black artist to light the way to the horizon. Hurston could not accept such an accommodation to the canon and criticized her peers for neglecting the opportunity of demonstrating the verbal and artistic talents everywhere evident in the black community not just in its most privileged and educated members. in this thesis i propose that the linguistic horizon Hurston bases on black rhetoric of Signifyin(g) is her main tool for both true representation of blacks and subtle criticism of her contemporaries.