ISBN: 9780817311315

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is the first single-authored book-length study of Zora Neale Hurston and provides the most thorough and meticulous examination of her full bod… Plus…

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is the first single-authored book-length study of Zora Neale Hurston and provides the most thorough and meticulous examination of her full body of work. A number of earlier critics have concluded that Hurston simply capitulated to external demands, writing stories white people wanted to hear. Susan Edwards Meisenhelder, however, argues that Hurston's response to her situation was much more sophisticated than her detractors have recognized. Meisenhelder suggests, in fact, that Hurston's work, both fictional and anthropological, constitutes an extended critique of the values of white culture and a rejection of white models for black people. Repeatedly, Hurston's work shows the divisive effects that traditional white values, including class divisions and gender imbalances, have on blacks.While Hurston openly criticized white culture in letters, in articles for black publications, and in the manuscript version of her autobiography, her attack is more indirect in most of her work, which was largely published by white publishers and in white periodicals. Meisenhelder convincingly demonstrates that Hurston, drawing a lesson from African American folk tales dealing with black survival in a white world, plays the role of the artful trickster in such publications. In the tales of Daddy Mention, High John de Conquer, and other figures that she recorded and commented on in her anthropological works, Hurston found models of black people self-consciously donning a mask of subservience, even living up to racist stereotypes, to make fun of and win something from whites. Seeing Hurston as such a trickster figure in her writing invites substantialreinterpretation of many of her works.Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick is a ground-breaking study valuable for classroom use and recommended for all academic libraries -- undergraduate, graduate, and research. Media > Book, [PU: University of Alabama Press]<

2014, ISBN: 9780817311315

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Trade Paperback. Good. edge wear; This critique about the intellectual and moral confusions of our age promotes the view that young people, lacking… Plus…

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Trade Paperback. Good. edge wear; This critique about the intellectual and moral confusions of our age promotes the view that young people, lacking an understanding of the past and a vision of the future, live in an impoverished present. The author claims that universities no longer provide the knowledge of the great tradition of philosophy and literature that made students aware of the order of nature and of man's place within it and that higher education fails to arouse or to nurture the self-knowledge that has always been the basis for serious, humane learning. The result is a diagnosis of cultural changes which occurred in the last decades in Western civilization, including changes in the language of politics and morals., Simon & Schuster, 1987, Last Word Press. PAMPHLET. ?The SI (Situationist International) must be counted as a basic reference point for any future revolutionary movement. The SI?s powerful critique of the revolutionary herself may have degenerated in the period of counter-revolution into a dead-end addiction to naval-gazing; but this cannot obscure the continued necessity of engaging with their arguments. Despite the attention the SI receives, and the attempts over the years by various toss-pots to claim them for modern art or cultural studies, the SI remains in some sense irrecuperable.? . New. 2014., Last Word Press, 2014, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001. Tiny edge-ding on back cover and three pages. No spine creases. No highlighting. No underlining or annotations. Examines how Hurston circumvented the constraints of the white publishing world and a predominantly white readership to critique white culture and its effects on the black community (excerpted from the back cover). 258 pages.. First Paperback Edition. Paperback. Near Fine., University of Alabama Press, 2001<