Autobiographical Mobility in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road
| dc.contributor.advisor | Ophir, Ella | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Martin, Ann | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Banco, Lindsey | |
| dc.creator | MADUMERE, LAUREL CHIKWADO | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2025-01-08T16:39:48Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2025-01-08T16:39:48Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2024 | |
| dc.date.created | 2024-09 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-09-19 | |
| dc.date.submitted | September 2024 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2025-01-08T16:39:48Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), is narrated in ways that the autobiographer’s movements follow her growth in age, education, society, and career as a folklorist. Some scholars of American literature have studied the movement in Dust Tracks on a Road. For instance, Lionnet-McCumber saw movement in Dust Tracks as a metaphor; Kübler studied movement in the text as an adventure; and Sherrard-Johnson studied movement in Hurston’s autobiography in relation to other African American autobiographies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the above scholars suggest, mobility is a recurring motif in Hurston’s autobiography. However, these critics do not make quite explicit the relationship between some of the narrator’s movements and her growth; they do not fully examine the importance of those relocations to the autobiographer’s understanding of the world. To the best of my knowledge, no scholar has studied exhaustively, the significant complications of Hurston’s intricate relocations, and the absence of such scholarship has created a gap, in the study of Dust Tracks, that requires critical intervention. Therefore, in this essay, I examine in more profound ways the complexities of Hurston’s mobility in Dust Tracks on a Road. I chart the different kinds of journeys that the narrator undertakes and how each type affects her growth and development. Thus, I employ the autobiographer’s intricate mobility as agency to the actualization of her bildungsroman arc. In conclusion, I adumbrate the ways that Hurston’s journeys portray and significantly accentuate the larger African American cultural and human movements from varied locations to Harlem, the center of the Black’s cultural renaissance of the early twentieth century. The essay finds that not all the movements in Dust Tracks are adventurous or metaphorical, and we must also consider those that are not. | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10388/16401 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | American literature | |
| dc.subject | autobiography | |
| dc.subject | bildungsroman | |
| dc.subject | Harlem | |
| dc.subject | Hurston | |
| dc.subject | mobility | |
| dc.subject | Renaissance | |
| dc.title | Autobiographical Mobility in Zora Neale Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| thesis.degree.department | English | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Saskatchewan | |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Arts (M.A.) |