The Power of the Porch The Storyteller's Craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan (review)

1998 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-70
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Bauer
Keyword(s):  
Zora Neale Hurston ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Randall Kenan

The Footprints of Ghosts: Fictional Folklorists in the Work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead

2019 ◽  
pp. 95-117
Author(s):  
Shelley Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Lee Smith ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
Randall Kenan ◽  
Interesting Pattern

This chapter looks at the fictional folklorists who appear in the work of Gloria Naylor, Lee Smith, Randall Kenan, and Colson Whitehead. An interesting pattern emerges when you consider the works of these four writers side-by-side: each of the stories are structured through a metafictive, self-conscious framework, each ask the reader to think critically about notions of authenticity, and each are haunted by ghosts, both figurative and literal. The ghostly is not an arbitrary signifier here. It figures an absence that has something to do with knowledge and text, with literary tourism, and with the inability to ever know, really, the shape of a community’s past, present, or future. This chapter thus argues that the character of the folklorist serves as a metonymic signifier of the absence always present in the representation of cultures.

Zora Neale Hurston

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amritjit Singh ◽  
C. Lok Chua ◽  
Lin Yutang ◽  
Ira Dworkin ◽  
Jesse Alemán ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Zora Neale Hurston
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document