Approaches to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works (review)

This Modern Language Association volume, Approaches to Teaching Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Other Works provides insights for teaching the works of Zora Neale Hurston, an "iconic figure on a par with Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and F. Scott Fitzgerald" (1) according to the volume's editor, John Lowe. Hurston's works—including novels, nonfiction, plays, and short stories—occupy the attention of Lowe and fifteen other Hurston scholars in this volume with a central focus on Their Eyes Were Watching God. This volume, within the Approaches to Teaching World Literature Series, is presented in two main parts. "Part One: Materials" follows the volume's preface. Here the volume's editor presents the editions and anthologies where Hurston's published work may be found. "The Instructor's Library" includes a list of books and critical articles that almost any instructor who teaches Hurston would desire to consult as useful information for research and teaching.

Appearing after "Part One: Materials" comes "Part Two: Approaches." An introduction at the beginning of the "Approaches" section describes the salient aspects of each article in adequate detail, and those descriptions will not be repeated here. Instead, the value of a few that offer interesting or novel approaches to the literature will be examined. The articles in the volume discuss the following works by Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God; Jonah's Gourd Vine; Moses, Man of the Mountain; Seraph on the Suwane; Mules and Men; Tell My Horse; Dust Tracks on a Road; "The Gilded Six-Bits"; The First One; Color Struck; and Mule Bone. Many of the articles do provide detailed teaching approaches, and a notable effort has commenced to encourage the teaching of Hurston's other works particularly in connection to Their Eyes.

Scholarly articles about Their Eyes have appeared over the years in journals and other publications, yet not many have focused on its presentation in the undergraduate classroom. The well-structured article, "Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Process of Canon Formation," by Genevieve West describes an interesting and broad approach to this novel. Her approach to teaching Their Eyes "uses book reviews to trace the ways in which cultural changes have influenced responses to the novel and Hurston's place in the canon" (21). She asks her students to read reviews that concern Their Eyes and some of Hurston's other works from before she wrote this novel in order to introduce students to the politics of popular and scholarly interest (22-24). Her approach is too detailed to describe in a review, but West enables the students to understand and follow the fall of Hurston's reputation with the literary critics as the nation moved toward the social crisis of the Depression and toward an interest in the literature of social protest. As a supplement to the reviews, some lectures and articles regarding the rise of protest literature, the Black Arts movement, the feminist movement, and the rise of black studies programs may help students to appreciate Hurston's literary marginalization and her eventual recovery away from the margins and into the center of the canon. Such an approach would appear to require a great amount of effort to assemble the materials and to coordinate the lectures and discussions. However, West maintains that most of the reviews may be taken from a single volume: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah's Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (22). Conducting an analysis of the reviews and recognizing the values held by the critics could give the students an excellent understanding of how literature serves the needs and desires of special interest groups in our society.

Their Eyes is reputed to be a masterwork, and most of the articles in this volume focus upon giving instructors insights to this novel. However, the editor, John Lowe, states in his introduction that other works by Hurston "need to be...