The Artist and the Folk: Politics, Identity and Humor in the Work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Sholem Aleichem and Mordkhe Spector.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the complex relationship between the author and the folk in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Sholem Aleichem and Mordkhe Spector. In investigating politics, identity and humor within this relationship, I place much weight on the concept of laughter through tears, a mode of representation where oppressive reality is refracted through humor. Laughter through tears as a mode of representation is a particular political and psychological strategy which models a way towards pleasure within a reality that is all too painful. The aesthetic it engenders is a masochistic one, where the release of laughter comes not from the pain of reality, but rather from the control one has over its representation. The dissertation also seeks to extend the conversation between Russian Jewish and African American literary scholarship. These two identity-based fields continually ask questions about otherness and identity, about diaspora and belonging, about dialect and its representation, about movement, migration, upward mobility, political efficacy, assimilation, self-loathing, communal responsibility. Through bringing some of these questions together I hope to elucidate the various strategies that minority artists use in approaching the folk that is both their subject and their audience. Sholem Aleichem and Mordkhe Spector in Russia and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes in America posit themselves as a new generation, and so the texts I analyze do not stand alone. They always need a parent, a serious or satirical counterpart, and the generational positioning of the authors reveals not only a conscious attempt at canonization, but also the dependence of a humorist on solemn representation as a backdrop to his/her own art. The new generation writers’ work reveals that even the serious claims are never safe. Their humor explicitly disturbs the equation of reality and realistic representation; it creates unease and tension, as opposed to catharsis.