A postmodern bent in their eyes they were watching God...Zora Neale Hurston has no [any] excuse. The sensorial breadth of his novel contains no theme, no message, no thought. Overall, his novel is not addressed to blacks, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes he knows how to satisfy. It exploits the phase of Negro life that is "picturesque," the phase that evokes a pitiful smile on the lips of the "superior" race. - from "Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)", a review by Richard Wright An Unfortunate Side The effect of the postmodern trend is often represented by reactions such as those indicated above. Zora's work was not readily accepted at the time. Unlike fellow writers such as Faulkner and Joyce, Hurston's was not incubated by the academy until the theory could reach inspiration. Like writers like Nabokov, however, his postmodernity is subtle, and his novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, is littered with trapdoors to immerse the reader in a deeper interpretation of the text. Cynthia Bond picks up on this in her essay “Language, Speech and Difference in Their Eyes Were Watching God,” when she calls it a metalinguistic project (Bond, 206). critical work that appeared after the rediscovery of Zora two decades ago and in the fact that, despite the voluminous attention paid to Their Eyes Were Watching God, critics have failed to explore every aspect of the novel, writes Ihab Hassan, in "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” that we can look at the writers of the past and realize their postmodernity. His theory fits the idea that postmodernism is not a movement, but a trait exhibited by certain authors who push the limits of their time. Mo.... .. focus of the article ......h, KA and Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. eds. Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.Bond, Cynthia ". Language, Signs, and Differences in Their Eyes Observed God." Appiah and Gates 204-17. Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences". Hutcheon and Natoli 223-43.Foucault, Michel. “Excerpts from Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Hutcheon and Natoli 333-341.Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1990. Hutcheon, Linda and Natoli, Joseph, eds. A postmodern reader. New York: SUNY, 1993.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Excerpts from the Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.” Hutcheon and Natoli 71-90.Wright, Richard. “Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).” Appia and Gates 16.