The American Dream Unhinged: Romance and Reality in "The Great Gatsby" and "Fight Club"

Research Article| January 01 2009 "The Great Gatsby" and the Arrow Collar Man THOMAS DILWORTH THOMAS DILWORTH Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2009) 7 (1): 80–93. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583011 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation THOMAS DILWORTH; "The Great Gatsby" and the Arrow Collar Man. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2009; 7 (1): 80–93. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583011 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2009The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Reading "The Great Gatsby" in New Jersey: Responses to Fitzgerald in Richard Ford's Bascombe Trilogy: "The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995)", and "The Lay of the Land (2006)" HORST KRUSE HORST KRUSE Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2010) 8 (1): 208–217. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583162 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation HORST KRUSE; Reading "The Great Gatsby" in New Jersey: Responses to Fitzgerald in Richard Ford's Bascombe Trilogy: "The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995)", and "The Lay of the Land (2006)". The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2010; 8 (1): 208–217. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583162 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2010The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2008 Anti-Petronian Elements in "The Great Gatsby" R. SKLENAR R. SKLENAR Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2008) 6 (1): 121–128. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583132 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation R. SKLENAR; Anti-Petronian Elements in "The Great Gatsby". The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2008; 6 (1): 121–128. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583132 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2008The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2010 The Telephonic Logic of "The Great Gatsby" ERIC RAWSON ERIC RAWSON Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2010) 8 (1): 92–103. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation ERIC RAWSON; The Telephonic Logic of "The Great Gatsby". The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2010; 8 (1): 92–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583157 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2010The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2008 History in Literature: The Story Behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" History in Literature: The Story Behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"Hensley, Laura J. PENNY RUDGE PENNY RUDGE Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2008) 6 (1): 193–194. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583144 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation PENNY RUDGE; History in Literature: The Story Behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2008; 6 (1): 193–194. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583144 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2008 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2008The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| January 01 2009 Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"Bryer, Jackson R.; VanArsdale, Nancy P. LAUREN A. RULE LAUREN A. RULE Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2009) 7 (1): 155–158. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583016 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation LAUREN A. RULE; Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2009; 7 (1): 155–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583016 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2009The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The American Dream Unhinged: Romance and Reality in "The Great Gatsby" and "Fight Club"

Consumerism and literature have a complex relationship. Literature often critiques and reflects on consumer culture, revealing its impact on individuals and society. Works like "Fight Club" and "American Psycho" satirize excessive materialism, while "The Great Gatsby" and "The Catcher in the Rye" portray the emptiness of wealth and status. Other authors, like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, explore the effects of consumerism on human relationships and identity. Literature also explores the commodification of art and culture, as seen in "The Secret Life of Things" and "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". Additionally, authors like Dave Eggers and George Saunders examine the consequences of consumerism on individuals and society, highlighting issues like inequality and environmental degradation. Through these works, literature provides a platform for critique and reflection, encouraging readers to reevaluate their relationship with consumer culture and its values. By exploring the complexities of consumerism, literature inspires critical thinking and sparks important conversations about the role of material goods in our lives.

A few years ago, an Atlantic Monthly headline asked “Must Every New Coming-of-Age Novel Be ‘the Next Catcher in the Rye’?” (Kelly). Fans of F. Scott Fitzgerald might wonder if its author, Maura Kelly—who once collaborated with Jack Murnighan on a book called Much Ado About Loving: What Our Favorite Novels Can Teach You About Date Expectations, Not-So-Great Gatsbys and Love in the Time of Internet Personals (2012)—ought to do a follow-up centering upon The Great Gatsby. Just as each publishing season delivers at least one or two novels touted as “a female Catcher” or a “Catcher for the ____ Generation,” so, too, F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel has become an all-purpose marketing handle. In recent years, novels as different as Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) and Sara J. Benincasa's young-adult/sci-fi Great (2014) have been promoted as spins on the story of Jay Gatsby's relationship with Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanan, and the American Dream. Recently on Tumblr an aspiring Champaign, Illinois, college senior described her entry for the online competition #pitchwars as a “race-bent, gender-bent YA The Great Gatsby” (Phenix).Its title?Green Lights.Stephanie Powell Watts's No One is Coming to Save Us is the most prominent novel lately to receive this “green-light” treatment. As Jade Chang in the New York Times writes, the book is a “skillful riff on The Great Gatsby,” a “Gatsby reboot” that pays careful homage to Fitzgerald's novel while recasting its concerns within a contemporary context (Chang). Over at National Public Radio, Ari Shapiro titles his interview with Watts “Fitzgerald Didn't Satisfy This Author, So She Wrote Her Own Gatsby-Inspired Novel.” In it the author goes to great lengths to insist she is not rewriting Fitzgerald: The kernel, the seed of the book is very much in the spirit of Gatsby: the idea that someone returns to a place that is home for him, or he's hoping is home for him, and he comes back and he is hoping to live out a fantasy life that he's dreamed about for some time. And so that kernel to me is what my book is about, or is at least a starting place for my book. But it goes in different directions from there. (Shapiro) Even so, she makes it clear No One is Coming to Save Us sets out to speak for certain voices underrepresented by Fitzgerald: When you read Gatsby, or maybe even shortly afterwards, didn't you want to know about Daisy? I mean, she's so flighty and she seems so ridiculous, there has to be something in there that's making her make this tremendous move in her life. Or Myrtle [Wilson]—I mean, she's so much like Jay Gatsby, you know: She's such a striver; she's trying so hard to you know “better herself”; she's trying so hard to be in another class. And so those kinds of questions made me think about, “Well, what about these women here?” I want to talk about the ones that are like my mother and like my grandmothers, who are striving and trying to figure out the world with not a whole lot of resources in all kinds of ways, but who want better for themselves and for their children. And so I'm really drawn to those characters that don't get their say. (Shapiro) Several elements of the novel do indeed evoke Gatsby, even though No One is Coming to Save Us is firmly planted in the red clay of the South (North Carolina specifically). The humidity reeks from the pages like the familiar summer haze of New York City in June 1922. The style also strives for Fitzgerald in its combination of rich words and careful phrasing: One of the tricks of time is that your own ordinary life took on a sweetness in the retelling. (210) They didn't experience joy then, just the immediacy of the life they were living. (220) Only time made it rich…. like smoke [it] undulated around them—elastic and easily bent to their will. (259) As Time writes, “Like Fitzgerald, Watts excels at physical descriptions that give texture to the world of the novel: a road curls ‘like a potato peel,’ a fingernail overhangs ‘a dirty dust line … like the vein in shrimp’” (Begley). Perhaps character is the area most obviously indebted to Gatsby: Watts's hero is a double Jay—namely, J. J. Ferguson, who is flush with new money and happy to flaunt it. His return to his humble hometown starts the juxtaposition of the Gatsby context. When Sylvia, the mother of J. J.'s love interest, Ava (the novel's Daisy), sees him for the first time upon his homecoming, the description seems particularly familiar: “But this man in front of her thought he could star in his own adventure, be the hero in his own story” (89). Watts seems intentionally here to echo several passages in Gatsby devoted to the charisma of the “elegant young rough-neck” born anonymously in the Midwest (GG 40)—perhaps, most obviously, Daisy's claim to her lover: “You always look so cool…. You resemble the advertisement of the man” (GG 93).While Watts uses Fitzgerald as a template, No One is Coming to Save Us stands on its own. The starkest difference is the focus on the tender interweavings of family, particularly the dynamic of mother and child, seen in Ava and Sylvia as well as Ava's personal struggle to conceive—a vast contrast to the broken relationships of East and West Egg. It is a delicate line to walk, this genre of adapting characteristics from the “classics,” especially when the source material is a novel as well known (and well-judged) as The Great Gatsby. Yet No One is Coming to Save Us beautifully balances the tipping point between paying tribute and redressing marginalized elements. There is similarity in the chaos of the characters' lives. However, Watts does not write a gin-soaked tale of tragedy and opulence. Nor does she simply transcribe the story into African American culture, as the movie G (2002) does with its story of a rapper named Summer G pursuing his love Sky against the backdrop of “hip-hop in the Hamptons” instead of prohibition and bond scams. Watts's storyline is her own, steeped deeply in Southern heritage and black culture, even as the epigraph from poet Bob Watts's “The Light at Hinkson Creek” places readers at the edge of a dock, waiting in expectation: “The light seems somehow brighter brought to rest … shimmering at my fingertips, so close to reach for it, the twice-bent gleam that passes in the swirl my reaching makes” (iv).Nor is there pretension in Watts's characters. The world her people populate is humbled by poverty and what can only be described as the stark reality of the black American experience. We are a long way, in other words, from Fitzgerald's white and wealthy realm. One quotation in particular specifically identifies that dominant imbalance: “These days televisions from the neighbors' houses flickered all night long courtesy of the satellites like Derby-worthy fascinators on their roofs” (278). That distance sometimes clouds the modernity in Watts's novel: exactly how we are supposed to interpret the novel through the lens of black/white relations, as well as how that lens is supposed to make us rethink Gatsby, remains ambiguous.In many ways, Watts's setting is far more reminiscent of the “Valley of Ashes” than the gleam and glitter of Great Neck (GG 21). Imagine Wilson's gas station after desegregation: “To this day some blacks preferred the pick-up window to going in…. Others loved the idea that the times had changed enough, the wounds healed enough that they could walk proudly through the front door on their own terms” (63). That disparity is the only thing I really disliked about this book.All in all, No One is Coming to Save Us breathes life into the Great American Novel that has been told again and again, trading the unfathomable parties and wealth for everyday folks. In one swift reference to “government cheese” (86), we are brought back down to the middle-American dream, and Jay's mansion is simply an exaggerated version of the typical suburban two-story. Whether the novel needs the Fitzgerald connection to catch potential readers' attention is debatable: the differences are so great that at times the linkage seems like pure marketing. The deception and loneliness and wanting that are so rich in Fitzgerald are present in Watts's prose if not necessarily her theme. That may be all the familiarity some readers find, but it will be all the familiarity some need to enjoy this entertaining, moving novel.

Book Review| January 01 2010 The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation The Great Gatsby: A Graphic AdaptationFitzgerald, F. Scott; Greenberg, Nicki DANIEL WORDEN DANIEL WORDEN Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (2010) 8 (1): 231–237. https://doi.org/10.2307/41583166 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation DANIEL WORDEN; The Great Gatsby: A Graphic Adaptation. The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 1 January 2010; 8 (1): 231–237. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41583166 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe F. Scott Fitzgerald Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2010 The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc.2010The F. Scott Fitzgerald Society/Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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>

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>

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

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. …

Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby are both classic novels in America, which have huge impact on American literature. Sister Carrie is the first novel written by Dreiser reveals the social situation in the early 20th century and has become one of a representatives of naturalism. The Great Gatsby, written by Fitzgerald in the 1920s, reveals the life in Roaring Twenties and exposes the broken American dream, and it is one of the representatives of Modernism. These two novels have great literary value and have been studied by lots of scholars. There are many previous studies about Sister Carrie and The Great Gatsby from the perspective of feminism. Since ecofeminism was noticed and popularized in literature study, some ecofeminist scholars have analyzed these two classics separately. Few studies, however, have done research into them together from the perspective of ecofeminism. This study focuses on making a comparison between the two American novels from the perspective of ecofeminism and aims at exploring the same ecofeminist implication implied in the two works from the comparative study of the two female protagonists and the ecological environments. From the analysis of the two female characters’ sufferings and the worsening environment caused by men, it proved that the tragedies of women and the ecological environment are caused by the traditional patriarchal system and the dualism fixed in civilization. It is expected that more people would change their traditional dualistic ideas of the opposition between men and women, culture, and nature and pay attention to their equality.