Gatsby:The Cultural History of the Great American NovelBeyondGatsby:How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American CultureSo We Read On: HowThe Great GatsbyCame to Be and Why It Endures

Gatsby: <i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i> <i>Beyond</i> Gatsby: <i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i> <i>So We Read On: How</i> The Great Gatsby <i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany &amp; Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

Anita Loos:The Soubrette of Satire Kristine Somerville and Speer Morgan Click for larger view View full resolution Anita Loos, courtesy of the George Eastman House Motion Picture Document Collection [End Page 87] Work is more fun than fun. —Noël Coward F. Scott Fitzgerald became the spokesman of the 1920s, but it could have been Anita Loos if she had been game for the role. Her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a story of a beautiful gold-digger’s antics, is just as evocative of the bathtub-gin era of American history as Fitzgerald’s early work, This Side of Paradise. Perhaps the mantle went to Fitzgerald and not Loos because of her special affection for the demimonde—shady ladies, con men and charlatans all-around—rather than spritely flappers and their coiffed beaux of the Ivy League. Maybe it was the rakish company she kept—hustlers, tarnished ladies and the occasional con artist, along with Hollywood’s working class of writers and actors. Or perhaps she was simply too old when the jazz age was ushered in; she was nearly forty when Blondes was published in 1925. When asked if she was a flapper, she characteristically replied, “The only thing I ever flapped was the pages of a yellow legal pad.” Like Fitzgerald’s, her first novel became an instant best seller, selling out in a day. The book sardonically depicts the underbelly of jazz-age frivolity, a theme Fitzgerald would later tackle with high seriousness in The Great Gatsby. Truth be told, Loos was simply too busy working to care about her cultural ranking or place on the best-seller list. She liked having a hit on her hands, but the work was its own reward. After the fuss over Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had settled and she’d had her fill of being a fêted author, she returned to Hollywood in 1931 to resume her screenwriting career. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had offered her $1,000 a week to join its stable of writers. One of her coworkers was Fitzgerald, whose literary star had fallen hard. One of her first jobs for Irving Thalberg, the head of the studio, was to rewrite his adaptation of Katharine Brush’s novel Red-Headed Woman, about a trollop’s progress from secretary to wife of an aristocrat. It was comfortable territory for Loos—questionable class climbers were her specialty. Corinne Anita Loos was born in 1888 in Sissons, California. Her father, R. Beers Loos, noticed right away that little “Nita,” the runt of the family with a mischievous demeanor and soulful, luminous eyes, was a natural performer. He became a stage father. His connections in the San Francisco theater world got five-year-old Anita cast in A Doll’s House, [End Page 88] followed by the leading role in David Belasco’s production of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Anita’s parents were unhappily married: “My mother was an earth-bound angel and Pop was a scamp.” She preferred her father’s company, though she resented being the family’s main source of financial support when he failed to keep various theater managing jobs. At sixteen, shy of five feet tall and with a boyish figure, she looked the baby vamp. Her youthful appearance, mature personality and versatile acting ability kept her center stage. Her father lent her to the Empire in exchange for pirated scripts that came from cribbing Broadway shows and then selling them for a fraction of the cost of royalties. For a time, Anita did double duty. Outfitted in a blond wig and billed as Cleopatra Fairbrother, she performed at the Empire while acting at the Lyceum under her own name. Despite her stage charisma, Loos didn’t fit in at school. The girls thought actresses little better than prostitutes, while her childlike looks didn’t appeal to the boys. She later recalled that she knew she was destined to be an outsider, largely commenting on life rather than participating. She also knew that she hated acting; the profession was full of “numbskulls and narcissists.” Anita Loos wanted to be a writer. She spent hours reading at the San Diego library and in her dressing room at the...

<i>F. Scott Fitzgerald at Work: The Making of</i> The Great Gatsby

High school and university students—and I've taught both—like to communicate with mystery, which likely accounts for the persistence of rituals even in this day of a post-lost, millennial generation, now nearly a hundred years removed from the one that Fitzgerald declared “grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Paradise 260). Students, I think, are excited when they discover that some mysteries do, in fact, remain—and that contact with them is possible through works of fiction, quite often through short stories, taught in high school or university classrooms. These mysteries seem often associated with a place, whether a room, or a building, or a patch of soil, or a city that has been touched, even if just for a moment, by enchantment. Among many examples, Faulkner transforms Oxford, Mississippi, into Jefferson, located in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in “A Rose for Emily” (1930), just one of his many works located in this setting; Sherwood Anderson immortalizes Clyde, Ohio, as Winesburg, Ohio, in the often-anthologized story “Hands” from Winesburg, Ohio (1919); Zora Neale Hurston mythologizes her hometown of Eatonville, Florida, as the home of Janie and Joe Starks in “Matt Bonner's Mule,” a section taken from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and frequently anthologized as a story. The list of literal places touched by a writer's magic and transformed into mythic settings that house mystery—that is, settings that create representations of reality that defy easy access through the senses—is long.Fitzgerald, of course, touched many actual places in this way, creating enchanted worlds sprung free of actual time and place and existing in a dimension filled with mystery. An actual Montana dude ranch that Fitzgerald once visited is now and forever also a diamond mountain as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, New York, will also never cease to be the mythical East Egg and West Egg in The Great Gatsby, as Louisville, Kentucky, will remain the enchanted Louisville of Gatsby and Daisy's first love, which keeps its actual name in Gatsby, but which also in the non-fictional world honors its mythic status through ongoing disputes over which house in Louisville was actually the house that belonged to Daisy Fay's parents in the novel. A less-often discussed example of Fitzgerald's touching a specific place with enchantment and, in the process, mythologizing it, is that of Montgomery, Alabama, which becomes the fictional town of Tarleton, Georgia, a thinly disguised Montgomery of the 1920s. The three stories in the group set in Tarleton—“The Ice Palace” (1920), “The Jelly-Bean” (1920), and “The Last of the Belles” (1928), now known as the Tarleton Trilogy—are among Fitzgerald's best stories. Whether read and studied singly or as a group, these stories, in my experience, draw students in by inviting them to examine the ways by which Montgomery, the place where Scott and Zelda fell in love, becomes the mythic Tarleton, an enchanted place where the mystery that was and is romantic love, remained alive, though certainly not always entirely well, from the first story in the trilogy to the last.Early in the final story in the trilogy, “The Last of the Belles,” the narrator, Andy, reveals retrospectively that love and mystery are at the heart of all three stories. He informs the reader that he has been told that there are “only three girls” in Tarleton, a fact that interests him because “there was something magical about there being three girls” (Short Stories 450). Each girl is loved romantically by at least one man in each story, and each of the love stories provides the central focus of its narrative: Harry Bellamy loves Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace”; Jim Powell loves Nancy Lamar in “The Jelly-Bean”; Andy loves Ailie Calhoun in “The Last of the Belles.” In each case the reader is led to question, not each man's conviction that what he feels for each of the women is love, but rather whether the passion is for something that is less personal than the individual herself—a question familiar to readers of The Great Gatsby. In the case of Harry's love in “The Ice Palace,” is it Sally Carrol that he loves, or is it the exotic South that she so strongly identifies with and finally winds up choosing over the life Harry could offer her in the North? In Jim Powell's case, he says of Nancy Lamar, “I love her…. God!” (Short Stories 156); but the reader cannot ignore the subtext of Jim's feelings of social inadequacy that have perhaps led him to an idealization of this local doctor's daughter, a woman of privilege who has the luxury of declaring love for him in a moment of drunkenness and then proceeding on the same night to marry a man of higher social standing and more money than Jim. And in “The Last of the Belles,” Andy is fully convinced years after he had last seen Ailie Calhoun that he cares about her enough to return from his home in the North to Tarleton and marry her. When they are reunited he realizes that he had always been “deeply and incurably in love with her” (Short Stories 461). After he tells this to Ailie and asks her to marry him, she quickly turns him down because, as she says, she doesn't love him “that way” and, moreover, she could never “marry a Northern man” (Short Stories 461). The reader is left to question on what this love that Andy is convinced he feels for Ailie is founded. There is the hint that it is related to his wish to recapture a part of his youth and to his infatuation with the South. With Ailie gone, he realizes, “the South would be empty for [him] forever” (Short Stories 463).In all three Tarleton stories, Fitzgerald interrogates the subject of romantic love and its mysteries. However, in each story of the trilogy he complicates the love stories by closely connecting the passion that these men feel for the three women of Tarleton to other considerations—considerations of place (all of the women are associated with a magical city in the exotic South), of changing gender constructions (the three women exist in a time of dramatically increased freedom for women), and of social class (the personalities of all three women as well as their futures are, to some degree, tied to the privilege of their social position). The world of Tarleton is both of its time—that is, anchored in the rich cultural history of the Jazz Age—and beyond its time, sealed in the land of myth. In my experience of teaching all three of the Tarleton stories, I have found that they invite the reader both to enter contextually the world of 1920s Montgomery out of which the stories literally came and also to confront the world of mystery at the heart of three of Fitzgerald's most enchanted love stories.The roundtable discussion that follows addresses both of these worlds, and offers strategies for allowing students to view the Tarleton stories from many different perspectives.F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing is used in post-secondary classrooms around the world. While The Great Gatsby is his most widely recognized work, it is only one of his many texts taught in schools, from “Winter Dreams” (1922) to “Babylon Revisited” (1931). After all, there are approximately 175 short stories in his oeuvre, and over the years, critics have devoted more and more attention to his shorter works, offering educators a vast amount of secondary criticism to support their pedagogy.1 Three stories particularly useful in the classroom are “The Ice Palace,” “The Jelly-Bean,” and “The Last of the Belles.” Collectively known as the Tarleton Trilogy, these stories have received critical attention from academics since Arther Mizener discussed them in his 1951 biography of Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise.2 In recent years, the Tarleton stories have been used in a number of university classrooms across North America.3What we lack, however, is pedagogy-oriented criticism that addresses the stories as educational tools. How exactly can the Tarleton Trilogy be used to foster learning experiences? As with many Fitzgerald stories, the trio offers a variety of possibilities. This roundtable will examine the Tarleton Trilogy from a pedagogical perspective, placing emphasis on deep learning.4 More specifically, it will describe the teaching philosophy and practices of Stella, a hypothetical professor, to illustrate how the trilogy might be used to foster critical inquiry by engaging dialogue and robust collaboration in a post-secondary setting.Varied classroom activities often lead students to take different approaches to their learning. A surface approach to learning “involves minimum engagement with the task, [and] typically a focus on memorization or applying procedures that do not involve reflection” (Smith and Colby 206). Conversely, in a deep learning approach, “the student focuses on relationships between various aspects of the content, formulates hypothesis or beliefs about the structure of the problem or concept, and relates more to obtaining an intrinsic interest in learning and understanding” (Smith and Colby 206). While surface learning and deep learning approaches are not defined as inherently good or bad processes, it is important to recognize that they are influenced by different approaches to teaching and assessment and may lead to very different sorts of learning experiences. In the following situations, Stella uses several teaching practices likely to inspire students to take deep learning approaches to their educational experience.Stella teaches in the English Department of her university. Her core research interests include social justice, self-identity, and modern American literature. She believes that for students to become invested in their learning they need to encounter planted opportunities to solve problems. She also holds that classrooms should be spaces where teachers and students engage in thoughtful dialogue on a variety of matters, including social issues.5 When teaching, Stella strives to foster an atmosphere that is conductive to collaboration and critical inquiry.To foster engaging learning experiences, Stella believes that teachers need to respond to the learning context. When reflecting on her own context, she asks herself a number of critical questions before preparing for a course, including the following: Who are the students? What do they know and what are they able to do? What are the skills they need to develop through taking this course, and why are these skills important? Stella believes that formulating these questions helps her to devise and facilitate learner-centered experiences. Moreover, she believes that deep learning experiences should present students with opportunities to solve problems creatively, collaborate, and critically inquire. She believes that students should have a voice, and she encourages students to articulate how they strategize their own work. Stella believes that student-centered deep learning shifts students from the more passive dynamic of information consumption to the more active interplay of dialogue and meta-cognitive awareness. Ultimately, she feels that learning is an intersection of context, active learning, and student engagement.One summer, Stella was given a copy of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, Matthew J. Bruccoli's extensive 1981 biography of Scott Fitzgerald, revised in 1993 and 2002. With interest, she noted that Bruccoli described “The Last of the Belles” as a story that “examines the Yankee narrator's response to the South as expressed through his feelings for Ailie Calhoun” (267). Reading this passage prompted Stella to revisit the Tarleton Trilogy, and what follows is a description of three different contexts within which she used the stories in her teaching.Before choosing stories for her courses, Stella asks herself this question: What is the desired learning I intend to foster? Which stories could be used to support this learning? To address these questions, she reflects on the learning context within which she is teaching. Stella concludes that her twentieth-century literature class would benefit from further developing their critical literary skills. After all, critical literacy helps readers analyze thoughtfully the texts they encounter in their everyday lives. Struck by the retrospective nature and socio-cultural dimensions of the “The Last of the Belles,” Stella decides to use the story as an object and tool of study.Drawing from the socio-cultural dimensions of the story, she sets the following two learning outcomes: (1) identify key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which a story was written and published, and (2) draw conclusions from fictional social contexts regarding wider social issues. While both learning outcomes have benefits, the second can help to open critical conversations about social issues of the past and then compare and contrast them to issues of the present. “The Last of the Belles” struck Stella. From the perspective of the narrator's present time, the late 1920s, Andy gazes back to his past. He recalls a summer he was stationed in Tarleton, Georgia, Fitzgerald's fictionalized version of his wife Zelda's hometown of Montgomery, Alabama.In Stella's view, while critics have given limited attention to the socio-cultural dimensions of “The Last of the Belles,” the story presents a number of pedagogical possibilities in this regard.6 Consequently, she decides that a key question for her students to explore would be what “The Last of the Belles” can tell us about gender, class, and ethno-racial identity in 1920s America. Stella opens this unit by exploring the concept of socio-cultural context with her class. At the start of her first lesson she poses the following questions: What is socio-cultural context and what is a social issue?What do we need to know better to understand these things?During this discussion Stella invites students to list different dimensions of socio-cultural context on the board. Some key ideas the class identifies include ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. Stella makes a point of highlighting these three dimensions, informing students that as the unit continued they would reexamine the story in relation to these important dimensions of Fitzgerald's context. She also informs the class that learning about Fitzgerald's context will lead students to draw conclusions about his society, and make connections to their own.Stella then asks the class this question: How can we, as readers, learn about the context within which a writer writes and publishes? As the class brainstorms a number of ideas Stella invites some students to write their ideas on the board. She then focuses students on Fitzgerald himself by asking: How can we learn about the personal context within which Fitzgerald wrote and published “The Last of the Belles”? As the class discusses this question, students identify a variety of ways they might learn about Fitzgerald's context, including reading his correspondence and examining the ledger in which he recorded not only biographical events but also his earnings and sales figures.Stella then asks students to form groups and collaboratively identify ways readers might gather information about Fitzgerald's social context, specifically relating to ethno-racial identity, class, and gender. She instructs students to make a list and provide a rationalization for each of their choices, explaining that some groups will be called on to share their results with the class. During the subsequent class discussion, students identify a variety of ways of learning about 1920s America, such as examining laws, newspaper headlines, and advertisements. Stella tells students that the Saturday Evening Post itself could be a useful artifact to use to this end, and she also informs them that they will engage in this process later in the unit. Toward the end of the lesson, Stella asks students to reread the story and identify places where Fitzgerald portrays aspects of ethno-racial identity, class, or gender. After monitoring this process, she informs students that they will complete this task for homework and bring these context notes to the next lesson.Stella opens the second lesson by briefly sharing some background information regarding Fitzgerald and “The Last of the Belles.” She indicates that Fitzgerald wrote the story in late 1928 while struggling with his follow-up novel to The Great Gatsby. She also tells the class that Fitzgerald wrote “The Last of the Belles” with the intent of earning money, and the Post paid him $3,150 for the story. The Post itself, Stella explains, was widely distributed in Fitzgerald's era and had a circulation of nearly three million in the 1920s (Bruccoli Some Sort 534, 103). Stella explains that in the 1920s, editor George Horace Lorimer packaged the Post “for men, particularly the upwardly mobile, middle-class businessman of the Northeast, where America's financial life was based” (Potts 14). As with any magazine, the Post had certain boundaries regarding content (i.e., sexual content) and language (i.e., profanity) in the stories it published. As Fitzgerald had eighteen stories published in the Post from 1927 to 1929 alone, Stella explains that it would be reasonable to expect that he was familiar with these expectations.7 She asks the class to keep the final two points in mind when rereading the story, because the way Fitzgerald represents identity, class, and gender connects to the of the which itself to the social of next instructs students to take out their homework and share their context notes with the in their She asks students to their context notes from the ideas of the in their After students complete this process, Stella asks groups to three of their key ideas questions and she of group one draw attention to the way Andy, the narrator, the of a in the story it is to Andy and his for from with the that she is not The group makes of the fact that the is an in a and uses in his of information about she just she I tell her that when she Ailie she to that other about She in if (Short Stories The group connects this to a that struck them in the notes in her that (Short Stories second group is to the of who is seen by both Ailie and Andy through the of social class and take of the way Andy first in of and of as a as I have He was with high and He very and he was he was a and and with that of that well on the (Short Stories The students question the of the connecting it to an in the same how to from a have in and seem to background at (Short Stories The students then to explore the to which Andy is because of his and how the makes to that readers to share the also after is from the and has a to Andy and when his of had about with him that could be was with a his was and in a that and the have an end he had been to his for his on his as though he had been and but the background of and out at rather out at she had never quite the in these even the of that had (Short Stories their to the in the story, exploring how the their for points out that through the of Andy, Fitzgerald uses a as an to describe to Ailie from other Tarleton by I that she was and different from these other who and in the (Short Stories The group decides that in its reading it is what Fitzgerald actually by student if Andy to as or if he some other of such as The group notes that Andy uses this not in a moment of or but as an that his is The point is by a later use of the as Andy and years after the end of the Great revisit the of the the of a where there was the of and and over a that to into the the the of the (Short Stories of the group that the was by the and by its and they explore its on their for Andy and in the group on the way that gender Ailie in the story, her for her as a students what it to be a that women in the era not free them from The students why Ailie would be to at all and what her with a man of her social class could both and her in of the group discusses through their to his of his feelings whether his for her from a to her from her in gender or whether it her in The ideas and questions by different groups to engaging dialogue regarding the world in “The Last of the Belles.” In this second lesson, Stella asks students to two questions for should we use the Post to learn about socio-cultural can the Post be used to learn about Fitzgerald's social opens the lesson by the two homework questions with the class. offer a number of different for the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's context, and they also have a variety of ideas regarding how to this Stella one in the of as She then informs the class that they will use a copy of the Post to learn about Fitzgerald's world. During the of this lesson, Stella uses a to from a 1929 of the at three attention to the and students are to while examining each of the What is being is the this ethno-racial identity, social class, has led the class to these examining each students have a to take notes and on the way they what they each Stella the class in a discussion regarding the itself as well as her After the content and of the Stella asks groups to develop a list of conclusions they could draw about the way ethno-racial identity, class, and gender are in the story as well as in the in the She also asks groups to identify wider social issues relating to these three dimensions, as in the story the advertisements. groups are not able to complete this task in class, Stella asks students to their of conclusions as homework for the following She also informs students that each group will one social to focus on as the unit In subsequent Stella to use “The Last of the Belles” to focus students on developing their at key aspects of the socio-cultural context within which the stories that they read written and published. She also how conclusions them to aspects to social issues to their own social Ice Palace” is the first in Scott Fitzgerald's trilogy of stories set in fictional Tarleton, Georgia, in the 1920s. As a love story, it provides an tool for students to the of gender in romantic As a out of story, it is useful for exploring that to the particularly the North and the South. because the story as it Sally Carrol Happer her on the of an open on a day as provides an structure for exploring how experience is in the process of the of her Sally Carrol to out from home to marry a to the she feels as a woman in To her the South is a place where never and she to experience the North where on a big (Short Stories the of her Harry Sally Carrol is first by the land (Short Stories she becomes by several cultural by the of her to make her feel at home (Short Stories by Harry's that she only to about by Harry's about (Short Stories by the and by Harry's on her of her When Sally Carrol becomes from Harry in the that is the of his hometown she up in its for two and becomes and finally she was to the and of Tarleton (Short Stories In this way, the story questions about the of out from for women who have that at least to hypothetical Stella, is by Fitzgerald's rich use of to socio-cultural between the North and the South in “The Ice Palace,” and she decides to present a on the story at an literature in She to with her and while at the is now a of who teachers for high school English classrooms. She also teaches a on research in an of While Stella will one in past conversations with Stella that inquiry is a form of research that to learn more about life experiences by the stories that tell about experiences. that makes of their through had of the best ways to learn more about experience is by examining the stories that tell about their that typically or conversations with the who have to in their and to the stories that these share then in their own or the stories that they have been the stories for key and then the stories to provide to them so that they can be further or with The story may be around the of events that it it might be around such as and

Teaching Tarleton

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Bruce Michelson Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Edited by Jackson Bryer and Nancy P. VanArsdale. New York: Modern Language Association of America. 2009. A couple of years back, after a student told me she had kept company with The Great Gatsby as an assigned text in every college semester for five straight, zigzagging through an undergraduate major in English, I wheezed over to the university bookstore to see if such a pattern were really possible. A way to test for it is to pause in the aisles where required books are stacked by course and section, and let the eyes slide out of focus, like looking for one of those concealed images—space ship, smirking clown—in the dot-art pictures they sell at the mall. Sure enough: in that term at least, the familiar spine of the paperback, battered from multiple uses and sell-backs, popped up all along the shelf with frightening frequency. If that holds true at your own institution, and if you consider that hundreds of thousands of American students also have to negotiate this novel at least once in high school as well (as standard fare in an AP course), then what most of us are really up to is re-teaching The Great Gatsby, extending, refreshing, and complicating whatever it is that our students think they were taught before. In the Preface and the Introduction to this volume, Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale, as veteran and established scholars in both American Literature and American Studies, countenance that reality: four hundred thousand copies sold annually, and surveys attesting that most of us in the colleges know that we're leading a return visit. The MLA has been turning out this "Approaches to Teaching" series for a long time; these books provide cover for that professional monopoly, against innuendo that they have lost relevance to basic trades that keep them funded. The format of these volumes frontloads the material that working teachers will want to reach for in a hurry—concise descriptions of biographies, collections of criticism, contemporary reviews, high-quality book chapters and articles; and Bryer's presentation in the Gatsby guide is distinguished for its clarity and for the shrewdness of the choices it makes, sorting through a ton of published commentary and organizing it by subject and theme. VanArsdale's catalog and commentary on web resources is also a well-written and discriminating shortcut; and James L. W. West III's straightforward history of "The Composition and Publication of The Great Gatsby" can arm conscientious instructors with everything they need to know about how this novel came into being. After all that, the volume presents a buffet of critical engagements with the novel—some of them plausibly centered on the dynamics and cultural context of an undergraduate classroom, and some of them not. Though none of the contributed essays directly addresses the challenges or opportunities that might inhere in rereading and re-teaching Gatsby, most of them implicitly address a question that hangs in the air, with regard to a book whose very name has taken on iconic presence in our popular and literary culture: why so much fuss for so long about a short book in which a flashy, sleazy guy from nowhere obsesses about an essentially-worthless socialite and for his troubles gets shot in a swimming pool, a plotline that doesn't seem all that different from nightly fare on the CW Network? Kim Curnutt's piece on "Modernity and Milieu" provides cogent answers, highlighting "a profound shift in cultural conceptions of identity" (40), brought on by the rise of mass culture, by the marketing of personal style, by the erosion of old social orders, and by "the growing threat of anonymity in mass society" (41), a gaudy world offering up the possibility that anyone—random somebodies here and there—could become anything they wanted, and that most would be nothing at all. Jonathan Barron's essay on the theme [End Page 167] of regionalism and class is one of the few that countenances the potential importance of exactly where, right now, The Great Gatsby is being...

Dick Humbird and the Devil Wagon of Doom Cars, Carnivores, and Feminine Carnality in<i>This Side of Paradise</i>

I once thought that there were no second acts in lives. --Fitzgerald, My Lost City (31) Few books have suffered Americanism's presumptions more unremittingly than has The Great Gatsby. This has again become apparent in the recent outpouring of work that draws attention to dynamics of racialization in the novel--to how Fitzgerald's book engages discourses that render racial and ethnic difference recognizable, including how certain characters are made to bear distinguishing racial or ethnic markers. By highlighting the novel's interest in race and its role in the development of discourses that continue to administer the recognition of race and ethnicity in America, this new criticism--most appearing in the last 10 years or so--purports to rescue The Great Gatsby from the sentimental attractions of a universalized, imperial identity. Like the scholarship it claims to challenge, however, this new criticism reveals the enduring hold of the Americanist romance and its confidence that the novel offers a straightforward description of something called or American identity. In its attention to representations of raced difference in the novel, much of this new work--as represented by such critics as Michaels, Goldsmith, Thompson, Washington, and Nies--is enabled by an assumption that practices and signs already bear racial meaning. This scholarship thus often ends up reifying a variety of presumably characteristic raced identities in place of a presumably characteristic unraced (if surreptitiously white) one, reinforcing the very formations whose genealogy it purportedly seeks to unearth. Thus this essentially statist inquiry into literature and culture presumes, as it is administered by, the self-evidence of American history and identity. Foucault, we should remember, indicted just such rightist thinking in Discipline and Punish, where he warned against writing a history of the past in terms of the present (31). In this essay I show how The Great Gatsby resists precisely the recognizant expectation upon which historicism, especially in the guise of an analysis of the novel's interest in racialization, is based, and how in doing this it points toward the possibility of a more open and critical form of reading. By repeating the primal error of assuming coherence between text and nationalized--and racialized--symbolic order, of seeking the national in the individual, recent criticism overlooks the irreducible complexity of the novel's attention to identity and betrays a desire to buttress the ideological coherence of as that entity is currently understood. One reason for the enduring critical fascination with the novel's rendering of selves, to be sure, is that The Great Gatsby is intimately engaged with tropes of identity. But the narrative structure of this engagement, ever suspicious of the sentimental enticements of recognition, precludes taking American identity--even racialized or ethnicized identity--for granted. Despite more than two-thirds of a century of criticism portraying The Great Gatsby as the avatar of the novel, (1) the manner in which the novel is thought to represent America continues to be taken for granted, relying on the same assumptions about identity that drive the romantic speculation about origins to which Gatsby himself endlessly gives rise (48): unswerving attention to the significance of Gatsby--both in the text and in its criticism, either as an unmarked typical or as an index to the hold of discourses that encode race and ethnicity--precludes focus on the presumption that he means anything at all. If the desire to read history into The Great Gatsby ends up locating in the novel particular racial or ethnic representations of identity, in doing this it also illuminates the book's cynical relationship to the representational enticements of a nationally encoded identity: the irreducible complexity of the novel's attention to identity--its narrativization of a longing for precisely the kind of stable identity that Americanist criticism has so consistently found in it--in fact challenges the instrumentalist critical tendency to anchor interpretation of the novel in the recognizability of America. …

Last Kiss The Great Gatsby The Great Gatsby: An Edition of the Manuscript

The American dream is one of the most studied subjects, especially in modern American literature. Remarkably when it comes to modern American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby cannot be omitted from these studies. It is true that there are many articles and debates on The Great Gatsby, and there will be more. Nevertheless, what makes this study somewhat diverse is that Gatsby’s American dream can be reckoned as a meta-meme inspired by the ancient Greek heroes in a post-postmodernist way. The article will particularly try to show that Gatsby is a timeless hero whose one foot in the past and the other in the future. Some may find Gatsby under the name of Hercules, some under the name Odysseus, and some under the name Bruce Wayne. Gatsby cannot be limited within a limited period since the connotations that his existence stand for create an everlasting effect on any human society. That is to say, the meta-meme, which Gatsby ‘radiates’ or reflects is the thing what humankind have craved for since they existed: Power. Some may call it the American dream or the multimillionaire’s dream; some may call it a solipsist’s dream. This dream, however, one way or another, is a dream that Morpheus, the Dream God, will continue to bring to us. Although it can sometimes be a nightmare, the silhouette of the dream will always remain the same. Therefore, through a comparative study of history, literary theory, mythology and literature, this article intends to show that the American Dream persists even stronger through meta-memes at the dawn of twenty-first century.

Reviewed by: So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures by Maureen Corrigan Guy Szuberla Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and How It Endures. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2014. 343pp. $26.00. Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On moves forward with the spirit and energy of a triumphal march. Corrigan is, after all, telling the story of how Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby rose from a near death to become “our Great American Novel,” and how, in her view, it endures as one of the “modernist masterworks,” a work to be set alongside Ulysses and The Wasteland (23, 176). Along the way, Corrigan reconstructs in detail the moments when The Great Gatsby almost ceased to be. Gatsby was published to critical applause in 1925, but sales were disappointing and Scribners wound up warehousing the second printing. When Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940, the novel was out of print and sales and royalties had dwindled to nothing. Writers of Fitzgerald’s obituaries who bothered to mention Gatsby generally dismissed it as a frivolous relic of the Jazz Age. In May 1940, six months before his death, Fitzgerald had pleaded with his editor Max Perkins to consider bringing back Gatsby as a “25 cent” pocketbook. He worried that when his daughter “Scottie assures her friends I was an author” she’ll learn “no book is procurable” (214). If only to set the stage for the story of Gatsby’s dramatic return as The Great American Novel, Corrigan reconstructs Fitzgerald’s personal failures—his years of alcoholism and writer’s blocks—and keys them to the crucial dates and dead ends in the book’s publication history. She draws upon the usual and expected resources of Fitzgerald scholarship, but she also explores some untraveled routes in reading and re-reading the novel. She has, it’s evident, steeped herself in Fitzgerald biographies and autobiographical material (Scott’s, Zelda’s, and their daughter Scottie’s), attended to minute details of the novel’s composition history, reception, and sales figures, and, when it suits her, has drawn lessons from the cheesiest pieces of popular culture and the most sacred academic rituals of canon formation. [End Page 84] She takes “the Great Gatsby Boat Tour” through Long Island Sound, which, even with its costumed passengers and ersatz feel, fills out a map of Gatsby’s New York. The chapter titled “Rhapsody in Noir” reveals, in surprising and persuasive illustrations, the connections between Gatsby and the hardboiled school of fiction headed by Dashiell Hammett and the 1920s “gals-guts-and-guns” pulpsters. Her commentary on Alan Ladd’s forgotten1949 Gatsby—afilm noir with a tough machine gun toting Gatsby—throws an interesting light on Jay Gatz’s midwestern origins and his relation to his dissolute mentor, Dan Cody. Looking for the early signs of the book’s revival in the 1940s and 1950s, Corrigan notes, as other scholars have, that the critic Edmund Wilson, the writer Dorothy Parker, and other friends edited and collected Fitzgerald’s work in the years just after his death. Their concerted and individual efforts set in motion a Fitzgerald revival. And, mirabile dictu, she finds the beginnings of a new life in the Armed Services Edition of The Great Gatsby—one of many books printed in paperback and distributed free to American troops toward the end of World War II. She discovers still other indications of the novel’s rebirth deep in the stacks of the Library of Congress. Poring over discontinued American Literature anthologies, handbooks, and literary histories, she concludes that in these textbook worlds of the 1940s neither the novel nor Fitzgerald had an existence. Not until 1955 does she find the first excerpt from Gatsby making an appearance in a college anthology. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece was then on its way to becoming “required reading” in high schools and college literature courses (227). In her introduction, Corrigan declares that she wrote So We Read On “above all, [as] a personal excursion into the novel I love more than any other” (15). In her final chapter, “I Didn’t...

The fictional works of F. Scott Fitzgerald are very rich in many ways. Thematically, they expose the air of his age particularly the post-World War I lost generation by the illusion of their American Dream which they nourished on ever since their childhood years. The clash between the rich and the poor is another theme, not to mention tens of other themes, such as love and war, success and failure. All these and other themes are delivered by Fitzgerald in innovative and novel styles and techniques quite peculiar to him. The present paper highlights the major themes and joint elements in Fitzgerald’s major works, such as This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby, and Tender is the Night Tender. There are many joint factors in Fitzgerald’s aforesaid works. The American Dream is one outstanding joint theme that marks Fitzgerald’s works. Most of the scholars and lecturers of Fitzgerald’s works refer to this topic without further explanation of the seeds of this ideal dream. The present paper sheds a glimpse of light on this issue. The protagonists’ journeys and final destinations to fulfill their dreams and aims constitute another theme; the class distinction and ruthlessness of the upper middle class against the young generation; the origins and scientific, philosophical and medical, geographical, and historical elements; all constitute minor themes and topics need tracing and further researches of Fitzgerald’s works. This paper is a comparative study of all the major and minor themes and topics mentioned above.