Going against traditional literary analyses Péter Gaál-Szabó in his engaging new book, “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cultural Spaces in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, introduces the reader to the various ways space and place interact in Hurston’s novels, and discusses different paradigms that bring about Hurston’s unique cultural space: her Modernist “nonplaces,” her religio-cultural space, as well as her gendered space. In a very informative and refreshing style Gaál-Szabó offers new perspectives and contexts for understanding Hurston’s blending culture and fiction, while attempts to map the contributions to the spatial discourse of two seemingly opposing schools of thought. The author thus incorporates the phenomenological approach represented by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Edward S. Casey; as well as Post-Marxist views of space and place as understood by Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Edward W. Soja, and David Harvey.
The full review can be accessed here: http://www.theroundtable.ro/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13&Itemid=9
MLA citing:
Bökös, Borbála. “A New Perspective on Zora Neale Hurston.” Rev. of “Ah done been tuh de horizon and back”: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cultural Spaces in Their Eyes Were Watching God and Jonah’s Gourd Vine, by Péter Gaál-Szabó. The Roundtable. 3. 1 (2013): 1-4. Web.
