Research Catalog

The power of the porch : the storyteller's craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan

Title

The power of the porch : the storyteller's craft in Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan / Trudier Harris.

Author

Harris, Trudier

Publication

Athens : University of Georgia Press, [1996]
©1996

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Use in library	PS374.N4 H35 1996	Off-site

Details

Description

xiv, 152 pages; 21 cm

Summary

In ways that are highly individual, says Harris, yet still within a shared oral tradition, Zora Neale Hurston, Gloria Naylor, and Randall Kenan skillfully use storytelling techniques to define their audiences, reach out and draw them in, and fill them with anticipation. Considering how such dynamics come into play in Hurston's Mules and Men, Naylor's Mama Day, and Kenan's Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, Harris shows how the "power of the porch" resides in readers as well, who, in giving themselves over to a story, confer it on the writer. Against this background of give and take, anticipation and fulfillment, Harris considers Zora Neale Hurston's special challenges as a black woman writer in the thirties, and how her various roles as an anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist intermingle in her work. In Gloria Naylor's writing, Harris finds particularly satisfying themes and characters. A New York native, Naylor came to a knowledge of the South through her parents and during her stay on the Sea Islands she wrote Mama Day. A southerner by birth, Randall Kenan is particularly adept in getting his readers to accept aspects of African American culture that their rational minds might have wanted to reject. Although Kenan is set apart from Hurston and Naylor by his alliances with a new generation of writers intent upon broaching certain taboo subjects (in his case gay life in small southern towns), Kenan's Tims Creek is as rife with the otherworldly and the fantastic as Hurston's New Orleans and Naylor's Willow Springs.

Series Statement

Mercer University Lamar memorial lectures ; no. 39

Uniform Title

Mercer University Lamar memorial lectures ; no. 39.

Subject

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Folklore
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147) and index.

Contents

Performing personae and Southern hospitality : Zora Neale Hurston in Mules and Men -- The eye as voice and ear : African Southern orality and folklore in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day -- Southern voices, Southern tales : Randall Kenan's "Clarence and the Dead."

ISBN

0820318574
9780820318578

LCCN

96003461

OCLC

ocm34192841
34192841
SCSB-2111170

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library