Their Eyes Were Watching GodINSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING THE WORKSHEETS
1. Both worksheet and essay assignments are tools designed to enhance your skills in closeand independent reading and critical writing.
2. Avoid excessive summary of the primary text to make up the required length of assignments. The overall emphasis in content of the assignments should be your own insights/thoughts on the readings. Show/develop your analytic skills instead of filling pages with quotes that you fail to analyze/explain.
3. Your typed response to each worksheet question must be, at least, 300 words long and in complete sentences (shorter responses will lower your scores; include and analyze textual evidence from appropriate chapter/page of text with correct form of MLA style of citation; response must be double-spaced, have a Work(s) Cited page, and a word count at the end of the response. (See other formatting requirements in course syllabus).
4. Do not rewrite the questions with your responses. List only the question number against your response. Provide, at least, three spaces between completed responses. All worksheet responses will be submitted in Microsoft Word format, not in PDF.
Following the directions above, answer all of these questions and then submit your responses in the dropbox that can be found in this unit.
1. What does the literary term conflict mean? Referring to specific evidence in the novel, argue why you think chapter 1 develops and sets up conflict in the novel’s opening chapter. How and why are the textual illustrations you set up in your analysis necessarily evidence of conflict in the novel?
2. What kind of reality does Janie Crawford’s grandmother paint of life for black women in the novel’s world and why? What specific metaphor does she use to paint this picture (provide quote). In addition, what history of black women have you read in Incidents in the Life of aSlave Girl (Unit 2) that seems to support this reality?
3. How is nature used as a metaphor both at the beginning and end of the novel?
4. How does the scene where Janie Crawford worries Tea Cake has run off with her money compare with Manon’s financial troubles upon inheriting her late mother’s house inProperty?
5. Differences in age are an important part of the novel. What is the significance of Janie Crawford’s response to Joe Stark’s criticism of her physical appearance?
6. Do you agree or disagree that Janie Crawford learning to shoot a gun shows the growth of her character?
7. Referring exclusively to assertions in James Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” and evidence in Their Eyes Were Watching God discuss the thesis that Janie Crawford is both a transgressive and “blues” character who changes her reality rather than suffer it. (It is important to explain with textual evidence what Baldwin’s argument is about the African American Blues and then argue how and why Baldwin’s arguments validate the experiences of Janie Crawford as a blues character).
Ebook to be used: Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial, 2000.
http://www.cnusd.k12.ca.us/cms/lib/CA01001152/Centricity/domain/5532/language%20arts%203a/Their%20Eyes.pdf