Essay on A Postmodern Tendancy in Their Eyes Were...

A Postmodern Tendancy in Their Eyes Were Watching God ...Zora Neale Hurston lacks [any] excuse. The sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought. In the main, her novel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy. She exploits the phase of Negro life which is quaint, the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the superior race. -- from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a review by Richard Wright An unfortunate side effect of the postmodern tendency is often reactions like the above. Zoras work was not readily accepted in its time. Unlike fellow writers such as Faulkner and Joyce,†¦show more content†¦Zora exhibits these tendancies, which, taken separately, have been expounded upon but not yet fully exhausted, and the time has come to realize her as a postmodern force. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in his essay, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, defines postmodernism as incredulity toward metannaratives (Lyotard, 71). This works out to mean that the overarching metanarrative of the world, which is given to us by the ruling class if one subscribes to class theories, that forms our worldview has failed to fulfill our needs. The world is now seen as intersecting micronarratives; people can relate because their personal explanation of the world connects with anothers explanation, but are recognizably individual because no two worldviews are identical. All micronarratives are equally valid in Lyotards theories, and this fits in nicely with postmodernisms push towards inclusion rather than marginalization. This theory also pushes postmodernism into one of its other major facets, the breakdown of binary systems. Hassan is the pundit of the anti-binarial division of the postmodern. He details that postmodernism is not anti-modernism; it is not a reaction to or successive movement. Indeed, it is different than modernism, but also shares many