As long as Hurston remains susceptible to what are essentially political judgments, her literary fortunes will continue to fluctuate with the temper of the times. Criticism that restricts itself to ideology misses the basic reason the writer is worth reading in the first place. Hurston belongs among the American classics not because of her politics but because of her language. She was at pains to distinguish herself from other writers with clearly defined social and political agendas. Some writers, Hurston charged, think there is bravery in writing for those “who want to hear the same thing over and over again even though they already know it by heart.... It is the same thing as waving the flag in a poorly constructed play.”
Hurston’s saving distinction was her exquisitely sensitive ear. She was sometimes out of tune, as when she tried to devise metaphors that were self-consciously literary (there is a basin in the mind where words float around3’). But when she deployed colloquial speech and celebrated its ability to move beyond mere denotation, she was a spectacular writer, and the farthest thing from a flag waver. When, for instance, she describes a speeding train, she uses a word that perfectly conveys the sound of the wheels clicking over the track joints: it “schickalacked” over the rails.
Hurston was a brilliant transcriber of colloquial language and teller of folktales, but these were only part of her achievement. When writing in her own voice, she renders the world in phrases that are palpable and wonderfully immediate. This is a writer who understood that spontaneous image-making is the mark of a living language, that a shared language is the only conduit we have into the interior lives of other people.
Hurston’s real subject, and this is the reason her work will abide, was the universal disjunction between the limitless human imagination and the constrictions within which all human beings live. She happened to know best how to exemplify this theme by writing about the lives of Black women in the American South, which in itself is cause for neither praise nor blame. Hurston rejected all the conventional categories -race, class, gender-by which some of her latest critics organize experience. “My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-so, regardless of …color.”
1.The passage primarily conveys the author’s （  ）.
2.In line 2, “temper” most nearly means （  ）.  
3.Hurston criticize “some writers” (lines 6-8) for （  ）.  
4.The sentence beginning “she was sometimes...” (lines 9-11) serves primarily to （  ）.  
5.In the underlined lines 22-23 (“she...blame”)，the author most directly implies that（  ）.