Welcome to English 11 Unit 3: No Strangers Here!
This unit's objective is stated below...

Zora Neale Hurston’s great American novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, follows Janie Crawford, a tough-spirited African American woman, as she navigates Florida’s wetlands, its single-lamppost, all-black town, a historical hurricane, and several romances deep in the heart of the early twentieth-century South. Since her first kiss at sixteen, the protagonist of this early feminist novel craves an idealized love. But throughout this bildungsroman (a novel of personal development) Janie struggles to find this love. In the rural idiom of black Floridians, Hurston’s protagonist strives to achieve self-awareness in a world dominated by men. Can Janie find the love she craves while preserving her autonomous spirit?

As students read Their Eyes Were Watching God, they will consider the institution of marriage during a time in America when women, especially women of color, were constrained by society in order to answer the following essential questions:

• How does Janie achieve a sense of self in a society that restricts the goals and voices of black women?

• Are the pressures against female development always obvious, or can they manifest in subtler ways?

• How do issues of race and class impact the fates of the characters?

• Why do these issues defy simple explanations?

In the culminating writing task for this unit, students will write a literary analysis essay centralized on the following prompt:

How do societal expectations based on identity shape an individual?