Abstract

This research project is an attempt to break down the walls imposed by academia between the field of literature and the field of religious studies. Literature and religious studies as academic fields too often operate in opposition to one another as modes of truth-making and epistemological grounding. Though the field of study exists as a combination between religious studies and literature, this field still leaves some authors on the margins. Some pieces of literature, including fictional novels, demand to be read with the backing of a religious studies lens, and further can develop into religious texts themselves given the cosmological assertions they pose. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is such a novel and it is one that has been left on the fringes of the combined field of religion and literature. Their Eyes Were Watching God, perhaps more than any other novel, bears weight in breaking down distinctions between literature and religious studies. Hurston utilizes fiction to interweave both the theology and the cultural practices of black religion into the narrative. Through literary analysis, one can read Hurston’s process of narrative creation as a commentary on the very nature of black religion’s formation and temporal location. This project argues that Zora Neale Hurston utilizes themes of time and sight, through the symbol of the horizon, to pose the deeper cosmology of black religion’s innate temporality as located in the process of narrative creation.

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