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GED Social Studies 1.1 Civics and Government
This video defines utopias and dystopias, and investigates how a utopia might become a dystopia. Can a seemingly perfect world actually be a dystop...
We may all be fools when it comes to love, but thankfully none of us will accidentally switch places with our twin brother and fall in love with ou...
Their Eyes Were Watching God 39382 Views
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Description:
Their eyes may have been watching God, but we think we know who won that staring contest.
Transcript
- 00:04
Their Eyes Were Watching God, a la Shmoop. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching
- 00:11
God was published near the tail end of the modernist movement.
- 00:15
Is it just like all other Modernist works? Or is there something a bit different going
- 00:20
on here? Well, what the heck is a modernist work? Let’s
- 00:24
start there. Laser beams and flying cars?
Full Transcript
- 00:27
Not even close. Modernism is a literary movement that reached its peak between 1890 and 1940.
- 00:33
It’s bleak stuff for the most part, often conveying the idea that life is chaotic and
- 00:38
futile and everything must come to an end.[1]
- 00:41
These aren’t books about robotic dogs. They’re book about robotic dogs dying…
- 00:49
Or worse – robotic dogs never even existing. So on the one hand, There Eyes Were Watching
- 00:54
God fits right in among Modernist writers' search for comfort amid existential struggles.
- 01:00
Just as T.S. Eliot searched for spiritual post-war comfort in The Waste Land…
- 01:11
…Eyes combines a personal quest for love with larger historical issues like racism,
- 01:20
slavery, and the oppression of women.
- 01:23
And hurricanes. Everyone hates hurricanes. On the other hand, there’s something else
- 01:29
about modernism … it’s very… monochromatic.
- 01:33
You see… modernism is mostly populated with… white males. Zora Neale Hurston is neither.
- 01:40
Janie’s problems, as a black woman, don’t fall under the category of Stuff White People
- 01:46
Like.
- 01:47
They don’t even fall under the category of Stuff White People in the 1920s Cared About.
- 01:54
The stuffy modernists were more renaissance than Harlem Renaissance.
- 02:03
In that sense, Janie’s story isn’t the same as Ezra Pound’s, Eliot’s, or Thomas
- 02:08
Hardy’s.
- 02:09
Eliot was too busy cramming as many confusing words as possible into The Waste Land to be
- 02:13
bothered with race relations and gender oppression.
- 02:20
And Pound and Hardy were probably shopping for sweater vests.
- 02:26
Or maybe we just need a different perspective. Perhaps the narrow lens of modernism isn’t
- 02:31
the right way to look at this novel.
- 02:33
Hurston wasn't just trying to overcome spiritual emptiness… she was trying to overcome the
- 02:38
double-oppression of being black and being a woman in the early twentieth century.
- 02:43
These were issues that no one who wasn’t black and female cared about, so it was quite
- 02:49
a weight on her shoulders.
- 02:53
She might have been a modernist, but at the same time, she was challenging the modern
- 02:57
emphasis placed on white men and white male problems.
- 03:01
So is this book like all other modernist works because it deals with depressing existential
- 03:06
conflicts?
- 03:07
Or is it in a different category because it discusses problems that your typical white
- 03:11
male modernist couldn’t care less about?
- 03:13
Or is Hurston a modernist who is challenging other modernists?
- 03:17
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
- 03:18
[1]I'm sure this is 100% accurate—or at least it obscures some of what's really important
- 03:22
about Modernism.
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