...Example of a Fish Tale: Old Stormalong – A Massachusetts Tall Tale retold by S.E. Schlosser “Now everyone knows that Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was the ultimate sailor. He was the captain of a mighty ship known as the Courser, which was so wide that she couldn't sail into Boston Harbor and so tall that the mast was hinged into the middle so it could be taken down to avoid the sun and the moon whenever they passed by. Her keel was so deep that no harbor in the world could take her, so she spent all her time in deep water. The Courser only went through the English Channel once. It was a tight squeeze, so Old Stormalong had the sailors coat the entire outside of the ship with soap. Even then, Old Stormalong barely slid the boat through, and so much soap scraped off one side of the boat at Dover that the cliffs there became permanently white. After that, the English very politely asked Old Stormalong to go around the long way, and that is what he did. The deck of the Courser was so long that the sailors had to ride horses at a full gallop from stem to stern when it was their turn to keep watch. Old Stormalong was the only man strong enough to handle the wheel of the Courser, and it took all of his muscle to prevent the ship from knocking down the smaller Caribbean islands whenever a hurricane blew into the ship.” A strong imagination is needed to create and write a tall tale. However, most tall tales have a basic structure, such as: 1) a character who is ‘larger-than-life’; 2)...
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...Have you ever heard of Paul Crockett or Davy Bunyan. If you haven’t listen closely you will be amazed. At a young age Paul started to have growth spirts. He grew 5 feet every day. He got to be so big that his parents forced him to live outside. Now he is 10,000 feet tall. He has a friend named Davy Bunyan. At a young age Davy started to have 4 foot growth spirts. Now he is 9,800 feet tall. for some strange reason they don’t have to eat they also haven’t aged since they turned 50. They are so tall that trees, houses and everything else has to move out of the way for them. Another fact about Davy and Paul is that Davy hates to be called short and Paul hates to be called tall. One day Davy...
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...The notion of Regeneration through Violence is not new to the American cultural concept, nor is the intensive use of myth. Richard Slotkin’s book meticulously accounts how the use of violence has been integral to the construction of a distinctly American mythology. Slotkin argues, “In American mythology the founding fathers were not those 18TH-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who tore violently a nation from implacable and opulent wilderness”. As a result regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience. In describing the evolution of the myth of regeneration through violence, Slotkin describes North America as an empty, unoccupied wilderness where resources are rich and land is free for the taking, or if not exactly free, the land becomes the rightful spoil of war for those representing the interests of civilization and progress. The symbolic landscape of the frontier narrative is marked by boundaries and by the encounter of opposites; civilization and savagery, man and nature, whites and Indians, good and evil. These encounters are characterized in terms of conflictand violence as the protagonist struggles against the harsh environment, the unknown and potentially hostile Indians, and the savagery of the empty land. As Slotkin argues, European American encounters with the wilderness produced a national mythology...
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...black-incorporated town, it became a place where African Americans lived without white influence, had their own laws, and had the power to enforce those laws. Eatonville is the source of majority of Hurston’s writing, in which her expression of her love for folklore and political views derived. When writing this novel, Hurston draws from her experiences and childhood memories of Eatonville. Without Zora Neale Hurston and her writings, the town of Eatonville would probably not exist or be as well-known as it is today. Through Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston provided political observations about African Americans. In this novel, readers can identify political authority within the African American community. Upon the establishment of Eatonville, Hurston expresses sympathy need for African American leadership. Although the need for African American leadership was important, there was a huge risk of African Americans repeating the very means of their oppression. African Americans way to political leadership is by gaining power same as whites. For example, Joe Starks gained the power of leadership by being a business man, politician, postmaster, and mayor, all positions which were commonly occupied by white people. Joe Starks' confidence and seemingly natural political ability also granted him access to power. Their Eyes Were Watching God both perpetuates and deflates the myths and stereotypes that are damaging to the African American image. Racial stereotypes in the novel continuously...
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...Danielle mordon Zora Neale Hurston's love of African-American folklore and her work as an anthropologist are reflected in her novels and short stories--where she employed the rich indigenous dialects of her native rural Florida and the Caribbean. In her foreword to Hurston's autiobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, Maya Angelou wrote, "Her books and folktales vibrate with tragedy, humor and the real music of Black American speech." A published short story writer by the time she came to New York in 1925, Hurston studied anthropology at Barnard, where she was the college's first African-American student. After graduation, Hurston pursued graduate work at Columbia with renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. She left New York to conduct research in Florida and in Haiti and Jamaica, and her field work resulted in the folklore collections Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). Her classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was published in 1937. Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke. Her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973. In 1975, Ms. Magazine published Alice Walker's essay, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" reviving...
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...[Courtney Herrin] [Instructor’s Name] [English 371] [Date] Regionalism and Local Color Fiction The story “The Goophered Grapevine” is written by an African American writer Charles Chesnutt in 1887. The story is considered to be extremely well written with a specific dialect of African-Americans in the South. The story beautifully captures the lifestyles of these African Americans before and after the Civil War. Chesnutt in “The Goophered Grapevine” explains the tension between the Afro-Americans and whites of America with respect to their region and color; also pinpoints the similarities and dissimilarities they both shared with each other. The story depicts the era after Reconstruction in which a businessman, named John, who is living with his wife in North moves towards the South due to illness of his wife. When he reaches south he gets interested in buying a vineyard from a North person named Dougal McAdoo. John thinks the plantation is suitable and has been neglected by his owner. John pursues to buy this piece of land and cultivate grapes on it. During his stay, he meets Julius, who is a slave, and who tells him a story that the land he is interested in buying was cursed by a witch and the plantation on this land was poisonous. Julius told John that before Civil War, McAdoo was able to grow grapes in large quantities in this land but free blacks from fringe areas used to come and eat those grapes. When the place was cursed nobody was used to eat these grapes...
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...Annotated bibliography (entries in alphabetical order): RALPH ELLISON Blake, Susan L. “Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison.” Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) 94.1 (1979): 121-136. Print. Summary: One of the main themes in the work of Ralph Ellison is the search for cultural identity. Ellison bridges the gap between the uniqueness and the universality of black experience by his use of black folklore. Blake reviews his work and discovers that it is packed full of folktales and tellers, trinkets, toasts, songs, sermons, jazz, jive, and jokes. She delves into Invisible Man explicitly, but also analyses his most important short stories. Additionally, Blake evaluates other critics’ comments on his dependency on Western mythology, as well as explains Ellison’s final result of rationalization in tackling racial issues by his use of rituals in his writing. Relevance: This article is important when researching the symbolism in Ellison’s work. Especially Blake’s extensive reading and explanation of the presence of rituals in his novel are significant (p. 134) and could be useful when researching ritual as a recurring theme in (black) literature. Booth, W. J. “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.” Political Theory 36.5 (2008): 683-707. Print. Summary: In this article, Booth investigates which multiple aspects enumerate to one ‘cultural identity’. Color, memory, and identity together belong to the struggle...
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...is a poem that was written in 1896, that depicts how African-Americans must disguise their true emotions by smiling, laughing, and going along like their not being discriminated against. During slavery, African-Americans were treated with such humiliation and disrespect, that they had to cover their real emotions just to make their daily lives easier. Also they had to keep quite while being discriminated against, or they would have to face the consequences of being lynched, tortured, or imprisoned. In this close reading, I will elaborate what message Paul Dunbar is trying to convey to the audience, and how “ Wearing the Mask”, can even be applied today. Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American to gain national recognition as a poet. He was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, where he was the son of former slaves. Although Dunbar only lived to be thirty-three years old he was well known for writing short stories, novels, librettos, plays, songs, and poetry. In the article titled , “ Black Naturalism, White Determination Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Naturalist Strategies, it explains, how Dunbar had to create literary strategies that were capable of critiquing the problems African-Americans had to face, but at the same time he would not explicitly confront white readers beliefs regarding blacks. I believe the perfect example of this is “ We Wear the Mask”, because Dunbar is sending subliminal messages of how African-Americans are being discriminated against, but he doesn’t say...
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...Zora Neale Hurston, part artist/author and part social scientist her prowess for anthropological research help preserve some of the African-American cultural traditions and Folklife especially those that stemmed from Haiti and the Caribbean Islands (you can check out some of the Haitian folk songs here https://www.floridamemory.com/audio/hurston.php). One of her strengths was in her incorporation of her research into her writing; the bridge of information can be seen in Mules and Men which captures an account of her own research adventures but also African-American Folklore and life in Florida and New Orleans. If one could consider Hurston having any weaknesses it would most likely be her political conservatism, her biggest gaff being on...
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...(Yahoo! Education - Dictionary). Zora Neale Hurston, an African American writer, anthropologist, and folklorist, was a naturalist. She was born in the town of Eatonville, Florida, which is five miles from Orlando. Eatonville was the first all black community to be incorporated. Ms. Hurston grew up uneducated and poor, but she was immersed with black folk life. She had little experience with racism early on in life which caused her to have unconventional attitudes later in life. After graduating from the Morgan Academy, Ms. Hurston attended Howard University and received her associates’ degree in 1920. Ms. Hurston worked several jobs during her college years but was still often in debt. She struggled with poverty throughout most of her life despite her hard work. From 1925 on, Ms. Hurston lived in New York and eventually joined the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the shapers of the black literary and cultural movement of the twenties. Ms. Hurston was the first black scholar to research folklore on the level that she did. From 1930s to the 1960s, Zora Neale Hurston was the most prolific and accomplished black woman writer in America. During that thirty year period, she published many short stories, magazine articles, plays, and seven books. She gained a reputation as an outstanding folklorist and novelist. She drew attention to herself because she insisted on being herself at a time when African Americans were being urged to assimilate in an effort to...
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...In their, James H. Dormon and Robert R. Jones refute many different misconceptions that they believe other people have about slave life and culture. One of the people that they believe to have misconceive some parts of slave’s lives and culture is Stanley Elkins. The materials found within the book African American Voices, edited by Steven Mintz, confute many of the views found in both essays written by Elkins and Dormon and Jones. While Dormon and Jones and Elkins considered the institution to be a “closed” system, Dormon and Jones did not see it to be as “closed” as Elkins did. Elkins believed that the system in North American slavery was “closed”, meaning that a mass majority of slaves were restricted from having contact with the free...
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...AFRICAN-AMERICAN MUSICALS (1898-1920) Fortunately for American Musical Theater, many of the black artists who had been honing their craft in vaudeville and black minstrelsy began to turn their talents to musical comedy. 1898—Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk Clorindy was the first black musical to make it to Broadway. It was not actually in a theater, it was presented on the roof garden of the Casino Theater (roof gardens were outdoor nightclubs on the roofs of many theaters—very popular in the summertime). The roof gardens provided a venue for Broadway producers to try out new talent before putting the performer in a Broadway show. Will Marion Cook, one of the most famous black composers of the time, conceived the show. In essence, he tricked Edward Rice (Evangeline—1874—1st musical comedy with an original score) into presenting the show on his roof garden by sneaking into a rehearsal and convincing the conductor of the orchestra to play his music. Cook placed his performers on stage and 26 of the finest black voices in America launched into a song that resonated off the rooftop. They were hired. On opening night there were 50 people in the audience at the beginning of the show and a packed house by the end of the first number. Broadway theater patrons heard the voices coming off the roof as they were leaving the theaters on the streets below and flocked to the roof garden. The show seems to have been more of a revue format with a very loose story that centered...
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...having their own purpose for African-Americans. White is an extraordinary artist who has changed history and affected many African-Americans for the better. Charles White Jr. was born in Chicago, Illinois on April 2, 1918 to the parents of Ethel Gary and Charles White Sr. At a young age, White realized his passion for art and it was only fueled more when one day after school he met art students from the Art Institute of Chicago who taught him how to mix paint. Not too long after did White begin to skip school because of...
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...There are many different cultures in Southwest Florida that one becomes immediately aware of as they enter the area. They include Native-American, African-American, Protestant, European, "Cracker", Hispanic-Latino, and Cuban. Because there are so many variations of these cultures choosing just three was difficult, but for my project I will be focusing on our African-American, Hispanic-Latino, and "Cracker" populations. During this project I will address the many and varied differences between these cultures on many different levels including personal or family differences, social differences and educational differences. I expect to gain a greater understanding about these cultures during this process and by gaining this understanding I will be better equipped to combine students from these cultures into a classroom of learners that are able to succeed on all levels of History education. Because I do teach World History having a classroom full of diverse cultures lends itself to a variety of teaching activities and extra curricular learning. Miami-Dade Community College President Eduardo J. Padron. Said it best when he said "Our classrooms are laboratories for cultural diversity and the disciplines are enriched when students contribute various cultural perspectives," It has become increasingly clear that we must get creative in culturally diverse ways in order to pull all of our students into the learning culture in equal ways. I spent several days researching the material that...
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...The novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” is extremely rich in dialect. Dialect is regional, and it consist of distinctive features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Hurston uses dialect to bring the story as well as the characters to life. The use of dialect makes the characters seem real; they are believable. As a reader to become familiar with the language, readers feel as if they were actually a part of the action. Early in the novel, Hurston tells her readers what to expect in the language of her characters. She states that Janie will tell her story to Pheoby in "soft, easy phrases." Being that the novel is closer to a Southern dialect, rather than an African-American dialect; this shows that racism is still around but is slowly...
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