ASSIGNMENT 25:
Langston Hughes, selected poems
Countee Cullen, "Heritage"
Zora Neal Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"

Modernist poetry and fiction often seems to say less about social than about psychological conditions. Its emphases seem to generally be on processes of seeing, thinking, and knowing. The prospects for changing social reality appear to matter relatively little.

Of course the modern period supplies countless examples of socially engaged writing. Especially during the 1930s, writers committed to economic and social justice spoke vigorously to American readers. Many of these writers, however, set aside the demands for technical innovation in writing, and composed in traditional modes. A good example is John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, Grapes of Wrath, which owes more to nineteenth-century realists like William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, than to modernist innovators like Willam Faulkner. But Steinbeck's purpose wasn't to create technically innovative fiction, it was to create a temperament for social change. Our anthology has relatively little of this writing, though it is there for the choosing.

What we do have, in work by African-American writers affiliated with the Harlem Renaissance of the '20s and '30s, is an example of both the technical innovations of modernism and a commitment to social change. These two strands coalesce in their poetry and prose.

Reading Assignment

1. Langston Hughes, selected poems (pp. 1731-1740).
2. Countee Cullen, "Heritage" (pp. 1753-1755).
3. Zora Neal Hurston, "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" (pp. 1436-1438).

Writing Assignment

1. What are the "rivers" acknowledged by the speaker in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." What, finally, do "rivers" have to do with the message of this poem?
2. Reading Hughes, discuss how the conventions of blues and jazz influence his writing, for example in "The Weary Blues." How are poems like blues songs? In turn, how is playing an instrument like writing?
3. Hughes's poetry is open to experiences of women. Analyze "Mother to Son," "Madam and Her Madam," and "Madam's Calling Card," and explore the ways Hughes transforms women's experience into African American experience.
4. We have noted above how Hughes's poetry is influenced by African-American musical forms developed in Harlem during the period he lived there: twenties and thirties blues and jazz, especially. If black poetry is, like jazz, a new artistic form, a new literary mode, then does Countee Cullen write in that mode? Discuss, using specific examples.
5. In "Heritage," what is the dialogue that this speaker seems to have had with his past, and more specifically with Africa? What has that dialogue taught him? Has he been able to synthesize his split being, as American and African?
6. Hurston was trained to be a professional anthropologist at Barnard College, then at the women's branch of Columbia University; later she added the profession of writing to that earlier training, and returned for her inspiration to the Eatonville, Florida, town where she was raised. There, she studied that community, its folktales and folkways, as a way of understanding herself as a representative African-American, with a heritage. Individual and collective, this heritage might provide her with a cultural mythology, a sense of origins, of relations to the universe and society, that would empower her. Read "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," her 1928 essay, and write several paragraphs analyzing the specifics of that process of self-mythologizing in Hurston. Is she always confident about its results? When? Why? When and why is she doubtful?

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