Reading Comprehension

PT17 · S4 · P1 · Q7 Their Eyes Watching God

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Many literary scholars believe that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) has been the primary influence on some of the most accomplished Black women writing in the United States today.

Topic

Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Framework

Answer a Question

Question: given how beloved Their Eyes is nowadays, why was it initially not beloved?

Explanation: at the time of its publishing, the black literary community was really looking for more protest fiction coming from authors. It wasn't until new standards of feminist theory and Afrocentric theory came along that people has a framework with which to properly appreciate what Hurston was going after.

Main Point

Their Eyes was initially not recognized for the great work it is because Hurston's contemporaries desired more overtly political stuff and the literary community didn't have the right frameworks for appreciating it.

P1 - Intro to Topic and Curious Question

We're told about this wonderfully beloved book, and in the final sentence (typically the most important Big Picture place of the passage), the author poses a question.

Any time authors pose a question, we pretty much assume it's their central purpose.

P2 - Answer to the Question (wasn't protest fiction)

The fact that the 2nd paragraph then begins with "XYZ helps to answer this question" shows us the Big Picture function, connecting back through the pronoun "this" to the question posed at the end of the 1st paragraph.

This paragraph rules out an alternate explanation for the lack of success (it was not just that it flew under the radar and wasn't considered), and then poses the real one (people didn't love it because they wanted something more politically active when it came to black activism.

P3 - How it Came to be Loved

The author double emphasizes the crucial causal difference-maker that new feminist theory (and Afrocentric theory) was to people ultimately being able to appreciate what Their Eyes was all about.

The author would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements about the relationship between art and literary criticism?

The long-term reputation of a
Out of Scope: long-term reputation
The author never generalizes about long-term reputations of art. In terms of Their Eyes, we could say that over the long term it went from having a reputation of "not important / relegated to the margins" to having a reputation of "very important and influential". But our Support Sentence is telling us that this transformation was very dependent on literary critics. It was their creation of new types of literary criticism that changed readers' expectations and enabled them to appreciate Their Eyes. So, if anything, we have support for the opposite of this answer.
6% picked this
Experimental works of fiction are
Too Strong: usually
This has nothing to do with our Support Window, and we have no means in the passage of justifying a broad generalization that more than 50% of experimental fiction is poorly received and misunderstood at first.
9% picked this
Correct
The response of literary critics
Why this is right
This answer surprisingly strays from the Support Window that locks in with the question stem's keywords, but it is appealing because of its weak language: "The response can be determined by X". That's not saying it's always determined by X, just that it can be at least sometimes. The author's discussion in the 2nd paragraph of why critics initially didn't celebrate Their Eyes as a great work supports this answer. He tells us that the response of critics (their negative criticism) was partially a result of (determined by) Hurston's ideological differences (her ideological perspectives and assumptions) with other members of the Black literary community. Their assumption about the purpose of Black art, at the time, was that it should "create protest fiction that explored the negative effects of racism in the US". Meanwhile, Their Eyes was not focused on doing that. And because the Black literary community had this perspective/assumption about the purpose of art (among black artists), it determined their less-than-embracing response to Their Eyes.
Skill tested: Author Opinion · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.
82% picked this
Literary critics do not significantly
Contradicted
Our Support Window contradicts this, because the emergence of new types of literary criticism changed readers' expectations and enabled them to appreciate Hurston. [the emergence of feminist literary criticism and the development of standards of evaluation specific to the work of Black writers] changed readers' expectations of art and enabled them to appreciate Hurston's novel.
1% picked this
The ideological bases of a
Too Strong: first / most
While there's evidence in the passage that literary critics sometimes consider the ideological basis of a work, we can't support the extreme claim that more than 50% of critics begin evaluating a work by considering the ideological basis of the work.
2% picked this

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