Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

It argues that Dust Tracks On a Road is part of a varied Black literary tradition which must be recognized in a revised definition of Black autobiography. Chapter six considers how the Afro-American literary tradition has privileged men's voices, perspectives, and visions to the exclusion of women's.

Chapter five describes how folklore motifs influence stylistic, thematic, and strategic aspects of the narrative. Chapter four shows how Dust Tracks draws on the Afro-American folk sermon form as a narrative and linguistic strategy which likens the autobiographical voice with that of the Afro-American folk preacher. Chapter three traces the teleology of the author's selfhood. Chapter two, focusing on the problem of audience, examines the relationship between the narrator and her readers. However, a close reading of the text in terms of its narrative strategies and persona links the work to the Afro-American literary continuum but argues that a distinct woman's voice must be heard in order to understand how the female experience may be different from the dominant male tradition but equally authentic. This view of the autobiography has resulted in the work's exclusion from the Afro-American literary mainstream. The largely negative criticism argues that Dust Tracks disappoints the militant expectations of the Afro-American autobiographical tradition. Described as enigmatic and idiosyncratic, it is considered unrepresentational of Black life and uncharacteristic of Afro-American literature. Zora Neal Hurston's autobiography, Dust Tracks On a Road has been denounced as shallow, dishonest, and disingenuous. Zora Neale Hurston's 'Dust Tracks On a Road': Black autobiography in a different voiceĭeborah G Plant, University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston