First: Take this quiz to figure out where your dialect comes from: American Dialect
This week's topic:
Last week, when we started listening to the audio book of Their Eyes Were Watching God, we talked about the dialect and people's reactions to hearing and reading it. Other people have also wondered about it and have studied it. In fact, Hurston's heavy use of dialect and folk speech drew both praise and criticism from her African-American contemporaries.
Philosopher and critic Alain Locke praised Hurston's "gift for poetic phrase...and rare dialect," and considered it a welcome replacement "for so much faulty local color fiction about Negroes."
The harshest criticism came from Richard Wright, who wrote that Hurston "exploits that phase of Negro life which is 'quaint.' Wright said Hurston's dialogue captured only the "psychological movements of the Negro folk-mind in their pure simplicity," and likened Hurston's technique to that of a minstrel show designed to appease a white audience."
Sherley Anne Williams, another literary critic, wrote of Hurston that "to characterize her diction solely in terms of exotic 'dialect' spellings is to miss her deftness with language. In the speech of her characters, black voices -- whether rural or urban, northern or southern -- come alive. Her fidelity to diction, metaphor, and syntax...rings, even across forty years, with an aching familiarity that is a testament to Hurston's skill and to the durability of black speech." (citation)
Prompt: Choose a selection of dialogue from Their Eyes Were Watching God that highlights this dialect and folk speech. Then, in 300 words, dissect that selection carefully making an argument from both critical positions -- both Locke's/Williams' position and Richard Wright's position on the topic.
