excerpts from critical reviews

See what Alain Locke, Richard Wright, Sheila Hibben, and Lucille Tompkins think about Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 11 Unit 5's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: The Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro, To Usward, Lift Every Voice and Sing, On 'From the Dark Tower' , How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Sweat, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mother to Son, critical reviews
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. grateful
    feeling or showing thankfulness
    It is folklore fiction at its best, which we gratefully accept as an overdue replacement for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes.
  2. convincing
    causing one to believe the truth of something
    But when will the Negro novelist of maturity, who knows how to tell a story convincingly--which is Miss Hurston's cradle gift, come to grips with motive fiction and social document fiction?
  3. facile
    arrived at without due care or effort; lacking depth
    Miss Hurston can write, but her prose is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phillis Wheatley.
  4. simplicity
    a lack of penetration or subtlety
    Her dialogue manages to catch the psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity, but that's as far as it goes.
  5. narrow
    limited in size or scope
    Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum eternally in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.
  6. sensory
    relating to or concerned in sensation
    The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought.
  7. chauvinistic
    convinced of the superiority of one's own kind
    In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.
  8. quaint
    strange in an interesting or pleasing way
    She exploits the phase of Negro life which is "quaint," the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the "superior" race.
  9. sensibility
    mental responsiveness and awareness
    In a rich prose (which has, at the same time, a sort of nervous sensibility) she tells the tale of a girl who "wanted things sweet with mah marriage, lak when you sit under a pear tree and think."
  10. sententious
    abounding in or given to pompous or aphoristic moralizing
    Indeed, from first to last this is a well nigh perfect story--a little sententious at the start, but the rest is simple and beautiful and shining with humor.
Created on Mon Nov 17 08:53:20 EST 2014 (updated Mon Nov 17 09:18:37 EST 2014)

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