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Compare And Contrast Tan And Hurston

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Pratikshya Thapa Prof. Alex Kurian English 2328-73001 12 April 2017 Winnemucca, Hurston and Tan The American Literature consists of artists from various cultural and social background who devoted their life in literary works. There are number of female authors who are known for their magnificent writings. Sarah Winnemucca, Zora Neale Hurston and Amy Tan are some of the famous female American authors. They belong to different racial and cultural backgrounds but share a common ground when it comes to expressing their life experience and opinions through their literary art works. Moreover, they are thought to be the public figures who have contributed to American literature over the past decades. The authors mentioned above have their own writing …show more content…

Her famous literary work ‘How It Feels To Be Colored Me’ was the portrayal of the racial discrimination and inequalities faced by the Black people during that period. Hurston explains how she for the first time in her life realized she was colored and her experiences as a minority is being gracefully put into words (Baym, 2012). Her basic purpose of writing was to provide the realistic portrayal of her race the way it is. Similarly, she did not have any complaints about being black while she didn’t want to fall behind because of the racial issue. Likewise, Amy Tan being a Chinese American author grew up in an environment which had a mixture of Chinese and American culture. Tan expresses the life experiences of Chinese immigrants to the United States and attempts to depict the relationship of a mother and daughter through her significant piece of writing ‘The Joy Club’. Therefore, all these authors somehow portrayed their early struggles and their view point towards life from their literary …show more content…

For instance, her famous novel ‘The Joy Luck Club’ depicts the Chinese mother and her American daughter relationship where they go through various circumstances trying to understand each other including the evolvement that comes in their relationships as the daughters know more about their mother’s life stories. Secondly, Tan considers the theme of identity in terms of Chinese immigrants and their life experiences as an immigrant in the United States. She reveals how the children born to the immigrants strive in an environment which is a mixture of American and Chinese influence. Moreover, Tan is found to have explored identity issues through her fictive creations and tackled the issue of authorial identity (Becnel, 2010). Similarly, romantic love is another subject included in the literary artworks of Amy Tan which considers the relationships and romance an important aspect of human’s life. She is found to have given equal consideration to romantic love as she discusses about the mother daughter relationship (Becnel,

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Tan that despite its evident differences to Cofer’s memoir is discussing the same trials ethnic, culturally diverse people experience. On page 881, Cofer recounts her first public poetry reading where an older woman mistook the Puerto Rican author for a waitress that ignites passion to the reading, “her lowered eyes told me that she was embarrassed,” [4] at the sheer power and conviction of Cofer enforcing that she is an educated Latin woman that deserves respect for her identity. While academically Tan’s teachers would always direct her to STEM subjects as viable career options which contradict the author's passion for writing despite not being on-par with the typical standard of what’s expected of a Chinese-American girl. However, what sets both pieces apart is that Tan does this examination through her mother and her own experiences as Chinese-Americans, while Cofer’s memoir encapsulates her own struggles that intertwine with the vast Latin woman’s

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The Harlem Renaissance was a vast artistic, academic, public movement, and musical advancement that changed the way art was viewed in a modernization. Artists like Jacob Lawrence, Augusta Savage, Lois Mailou Jones, Aaron Douglas were just some of the many who influenced the art world. The writing was also a large piece of the Harlem Renaissance, people like Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Carl Van Vechten, and many others were agitators who used their writing to influence. These people and many others utilized the skill they have and used their varying art forms to mold and manipulate the current world they lived in. Claude McKay is an example of a writer who endeavored to change the way the world regarded him.

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Two protagonists of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Lindo and Waverly Jong live the lives of a usual Chinese mother, and American daughter. They live through struggles, and although both go through journeys, there are key distinctions in which the Jong family does not complete the Hero’s Journey. The Jong family does not complete the Hero’s Journey, primarily due to their lack of sacrifice for the purpose

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Leonardo Da Vinci once stated, “The greatest deception men suffer from is their own opinions.” For eras on end, stereotypes and misconceptions have stood as obstacles preventing individuals from sharing experiences, perspectives, and ideas with one another. Amy Tan further exhibits an individual’s tendency to form preconceived opinions in her novel The Joy Luck Club. The pairing of Chinese mothers and daughters throughout Tan’s novel proposes that deception has a drastic effect on a woman’s life and the manner in which she is perceived. To begin, the strained relationship between Suyuan and Jing-Mei Woo signifies the misinterpretations that frequently occurred between mother-daughter pairs during the novel.

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Zora Neale Hurston was a anthropologist, novelist, and folklorist. Zora Neale Hurston played an extremely important part in The Harlem Renaissance, in New York City. Zora Neale Hurston is a prosperous African-American woman of her time. Zora Neale has four novels and over 50 short stories, essays, and plays. She is well known for her novel called Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in 1937.

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The experiences related and recorded in the novels The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, and Obasan by Joy Kogawa give great insight to the internal and external struggles East-Asian immigrants face in the Western World, specifically Chinese-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, and Japanese-Canadians. Although the situations have certainly improved since the mid twentieth century, many of the issues and struggles the characters in the novels face are still real and ever-expanding for over five percent of the U.S. population. To

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The Harlem Renaissance rose out of America during the early 1920s. During this period, African American authors, artists, musicians, and performers were drastically changing the culture of America. The large northbound migration of African Americans after World War I allowed large groups to settle in Harlem, a large neighborhood in New York City. In Harlem, African culture was celebrated and became an inspiration to the new definition of America. Black talent was starting to gain fame and recognition in predominantly white careers.

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Zora Neale Hurston, the author of How It Feels to Be Colored and Me explains through her essay how she created her identity by refusing to victimize herself in societies hands regarding race. She does this effortlessly with the use of diction, syntax, parallelism, and metaphors. Hurston expresses culture and racial pride while overlooks the differences between ‘whites’ and ‘colored’ and introduces her unique individual identity as a colored woman. The essay starts off by Hurston contrasting her childhood to her adult life.

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Many authors choose to write about characters who experience adversity. In “ How it Feels to Be Colored,” Hurston shows that there will always be difficult times, but being able to learn and take an advantage out of the adversity will show a great benefit. Taking a bad experience and being able to know your worth even if most do not will give you an advantage, Hurston says, “ How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.” Hurston uses a sense of humor towards discrimnation, The effects of adversity are prominent in my mother’s life.

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The horizon, the place where the sky meets the earth, where the sun emerges with soft light and retreats to rest, the first one who let us know that the earth was round and what looks to be the destination of migrating birds. The horizon has been our farthest and yet closest neighbor, teacher, and home and in Hurston’s captivating novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses this powerful symbol to represent in its great expanse, a yearning that keeps restless spirits in flight. No one can see over the horizon and so it remains an ambiguous destination characterized only by the feeling of satisfaction. Though few take up in its pursuit, everyone has their own unique horizon; Janie’s is to find love but not just any love as she comes to learn

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Change Through Color The people that contribute to the American voice are the ones who aren’t afraid of who they are and express themselves as well as create a new identity for themselves and others. The American voice is a unique collection of authors that created a new idea of what it means to be an American. Zora Neale Hurston contributes to the American voice by using her experiences growing up to influence her novels as well as the fact that she helped pave the way for black people everywhere as she was one of the most unparalleled women during the Harlem Renaissance and is still notorious to this day.

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Mother knows best. And yet so many daughters in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club feel slighted by what the matriarchal figures in their lives have in mind for them, or rather, what they believe their mothers have in mind for them. A perfect storm of expectation, true and false, about love, about success, about being Chinese. The souring of mother-daughter relationships in The Joy Luck Club stem from unrealistic or ill conceived expectations that both parties hold for the other.

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Amy Tan is a Chinese-American author who was born on February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California. In Tan’s early life she had many struggles because her parents desired for her “to hold onto Chinese traditions and her own longings to become more Americanized” (Encyclopedia). While she wanted to become a writer when she was still young, her parents wanted her to become a neurosurgeon. When she got older and went to college she majored in English then started her career in the 1970’s. She was a technical writer and then started writing fiction stories.

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“Communication is the key to a successful relationship, attentiveness, and consistency. Without it, there is no relationship,” (Bleau). The Joy Luck Club is a novel written by Amy Tan. Set in the twentieth century, this novel depicts the life of four Chinese immigrant women escaping their past and their American-grown daughters. The novel reveals the mothers’ hardship-filled past and motivations alongside with the daughters’ inner conflicts and struggles.

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Amy Tan has “been thinking about all this lately, about my mother’s English, about achievement tests. Because lately I’ve been asked, as a writer, why there are not more Asian Americans represented in American literature. […] Fortunately, I happen to be rebellious in nature and enjoy the challenging of disproving assumptions made about me. I became an English major my first year in college.” (889-890)

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