Hurston, Zora Neale--Criticism and interpretation

A mimetic approach to multicultural texts assumes that literary representations are reflections of real life situations and persons. Moving beyond a mimetic approach, I argue that the multicultural works examined in this thesis present an odyssey: characters travel across cultural, political, spiritual, and imaginative space and readers follow those characters through their journeys. Applying possible worlds theory to literature written by African-American and Caribbean female writers allows a reading which never loses sight of the political or cultural ties to our actual world, but sees them as altered by the authors in all sorts of interesting ways.

Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, is a metaphor of the African-American striving for liberation. It uses the Exodus story from the Hebrew scriptures as a trope of oppression, struggle, and hope. Hurston uses duality and ambiguity to delineate the issues of struggle, allowing the reader to determine the significance of the narrative. Moses emerges as a "two-headed doctor," an African-American term for a powerful conjurer. Moses is presented as an agent of God and at the same time a source of power for the benefit of the people.