Spunk

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Dialect

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Literary Devices Dialect

In addition to being a renowned writer, Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist, trained at Columbia University by Frank Boas, who is considered the father of American anthropology. Hurston collected folklore and songs from the South, including the area of rural Florida where she grew up, which serves as the model for the setting of “Spunk” and much of her other work. Hurston believed strongly in the value of rural Black culture, at a time when mainstream American culture and the literary world derided it as backward and uneducated, and she sought to celebrate that culture in her literary work, by writing in the dialect she had grown up hearing and incorporating other aspects of her home culture, including folk beliefs like the spirits featured in “Spunk.” In the story, Hurston moves back and forth between the vernacular speech of characters like Elijah and lyrical descriptions in the third-person narration, rendered in standard English. Both styles of writing show her poetic command of language, but in this story Hurston lets the dialect portion dominate, demonstrating its capacity for vivid descriptions and memorable metaphors, as in Elijah’s assertion that nervous Joe “done wore out half a dozen Adam’s apples” worrying over Spunk and Lena, or the declaration that an angry Spunk might “beat you full of button holes as quick as he’s look atcher.” Hurston’s use of dialect gives the story a richness and cultural specificity, tying it to the world of her childhood.

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