Mulhern's English Site

P rint out and annotate the following story by Toni Cade Bambara. Highlight important sentences. If there is not enough room for annotations on the printout, write or type notes. Focus on how different types of literary rhetoric (organization of plot, details, characterization, dialogue, imagery, mood/tone, shifts, setting, figurative language, connotations of diction, etc.) support a theme. Indicate page numbers, paragraph numbers, line numbers, as appropriate. You might refer to the "Shorter Analysis Activity" for ideas: https://scholarmulhern.blogspot.com/2019/11/analysis-of-text-shorter-version.html

Zora Neale Hurston, an important voice of the Harlem Renaissance, was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and novelist best known for her work, Their Eyes Were Watching God.   Sadly, she died in 1960 after suffering financial and medical difficulties.  In 1973, Alice Walker, another famous American writer, "rediscovered" Hurston and promoted her body of work.  In the classic essay, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," Hurston explores the idea that all of us have multiple selves, depending upon the context and environments in which we find ourselves.  Hurston's writing has an ebullience, self-assertiveness, and pride that is particularly evident in this text.  She was a flamboyant and dramatic personality, at times clashing with fellow writers from the Harlem Renaissance, who believed that black Americans should use their art to speak out against racial oppression and the white majority. Hurston chose not to align herself with the political ideologies of ot...