question_answer

Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions given below.

Passage

Labelling Zora Neale Hurston "a writer of the Harlem Renaissance" is a characterization that may, at first glance, obscure, rather than clarity, the particularities of her career. The Harlem Renaissance was a spirit more than a movement and because a spirit is ephemeral, generalizations about the Harlem Renaissance and its writers are either too hard or too easy. They have come easily enough to a whole generation of critics, but their pithy summaries seldom reflect the wide divisions between Blacks and Whites, the Black intelligentsia and Black workers. Black writers and their middle class audience that marked the era. When one studies in depth the phenomenon of what was then called the Negro Renaissance or the New Negro Renaissance and what is now called the Harlem Renaissance, one comes away with a bewildering complex of notions, statements, affirmations and manifestos. Although there is general agreement that the Harlem Renaissance is bounded by the 1918 armistice ending the First World War and the beginning of the great depression in 1930, some historians have stretched the boundaries to before the war (1914) and after Frankline Delano Roosevelt's second term (1941). There has been a widespread tendency to regard the Harlem Renaissance as a monolithic cultural movement, capable of reduction to one orthodoxy or another or to a set of characteristic principles. This presumption reflects the bias in most American scholarship that postulates Black people as united entity and then poses theories ignoring individuation of thought and feeling. Sometimes, however, an individual career can be best assessed in the context of an age and this is largely case with the writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. She spends exactly two paragraphs on the Renaissance in her autobiography and her other writing, public and private, offers very little discussion of what the Harlem Renaissance meant to her. Yet her part in the Renaissance is well-documented in the reminiscences of others, with unanimous agreement that she was one of the most memorable personages of the period. Langston Hughes put it in The Big Sea, she 'was certainly the most amusing' of the Harlem Renaissance artists, 'full of side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales and tragicomic stories.' Hughes's words should not imply that she was solely an entertainer. Although, she was independent and scornful of literary movements, she shared in the historical and cultural forces that made the Harlem Renaissance an identifiable moment in American intellectual history, a part of a historical process that, as most critics recognize, altered Black life in America. She, in turn responded to and helped to shape the aesthetic assumptions of that era. Between 1919 and 1930, Black writers were published in greater numbers than in any single decade in American life prior to the 1960s, Hurston's awareness of this literary ferment certainly contributed to her development as a writer.

 

The author suggests that, which of the following is an overlooked yet significant aspect of the Harlem Renaissance?

A)  The similarity of the works produced by Black writers during the Harlem Renaissance

B)  The perceptions of the central figures of the Harlem   Renaissance   as   recorded   in autobiographies and letters

C)  The interdisciplinary nature of Hurston's work

D)  The nature of the relationship between Black artists and their audiences