ABSTRACT
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) depicts a black working-class woman’s creativity of action. This chapter endeavors to illuminate the role of poetic agency for her second novel. Hurston’s protagonist, Janie Crawford, engages in various kinds of imaginative practice, from storytelling and self-creation to her attempt to find a balance between work and play. Schulenberg advances the idea that Crawford’s process of black female emancipation is also a process of aesthetic emancipation. Depicting a humanist world of praxis in which the poetry of human creativity is of the utmost importance, Hurston’s novel questions the notion of human answerability to something nonhuman as well as the gesture of a convergence to the antecedently real or true. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part discusses Hurston’s understanding of race and individualism, and the second highlights the significance of the idea of self-creation for her novel. The final part analyzes the dialectics of work and play in Hurston’s text and also discusses the role of religion (or of “the religious,” as Dewey explains it in A Common Faith [1934]).
