Translation features of expressive means based on the novel by F. Fitzgerald “The Great Gatsby”

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Context

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

The title of Mark Bueschel's new book does not immediately suggest connections to F. Scott Fitzgerald; however, upon reviewing the table of contents, he does include a chapter that could potentially contribute to underexplored elements of Fitzgerald studies. In “‘A Story of the West, After All’: The Sacramental and Midwestern Pastoral Subtext of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby,” Bueschel attempts to connect his larger discussion regarding Midwestern pastoral imagery and sacramentalism to Fitzgerald's work. While Bueschel's book overreaches much of the time, trying to connect very different authors and works while not always clearly establishing a sense of definition, particularly with respect to modernism, some of his comments regarding Fitzgerald do encourage reconsideration of the author's role as a Midwestern writer and the way he can be contrasted with his regional contemporaries.Bueschel begins his chapter on Fitzgerald by accurately noting that: “To include F. Scott Fitzgerald in a discussion of Midwestern authors and their sacramental view of the Midwestern land may seem strange and tenuous from a variety of angles” (243). He cites many of the reasons for this tenuous connection, from Fitzgerald's youth in the Midwest and his later distance from the region, to his typical literary focus on urban instead of rural or small town locations. The discussion in this chapter focuses on The Great Gatsby but also mentions “Absolution” (1924) and “The Swimmers” (1929). There are definite limitations in how Bueschel executes his analysis of Fitzgerald's work; his greatest strength is in the effort to place Fitzgerald back among his Midwestern contemporaries (other chapters deal with Sherwood Anderson, Willa Cather, and Ruth Suckow) and to note potential modernist connections. Fitzgerald's knowledge of the literary world of his time argues for interesting contrasts in both cases (connections that are often underexplored in scholarship), for while he may not have always adopted the same styles or conventions, he was decidedly part of shaping that literary era and reflexively being shaped by those he knew and read.Bueschel argues in that “upon close investigation of The Great Gatsby as well as others of Fitzgerald's works, one finds that significant references to the natural realm form a vital subtext to the urban plot superstructure of the text” (245). He also notes that “it is a particularly Midwestern historical and cultural experience that often shapes Fitzgerald's characters’ vision of America as a whole and even of the world” (245). Bueschel highlights the various ways he sees this emphasis on nature occurring in Fitzgerald's work, alleging that Nick's home on West Egg has pastoral elements similar to the landscape he left in the Midwest and pointing out the incongruity between the materialism of the characters in The Great Gatsby and the different values many of them may have had with a greater connection to, or awareness of, the Midwestern land.However, as I noted, there are some limitations to the Fitzgerald scholarship in this chapter. As Bueschel highlights an American vision represented by the character of Henry Clay Marston in “The Swimmers,” he asserts in an endnote that “[t]he middle name ‘Clay’ here indicates the character's ability to perceive the spiritual significance and vitality of American soil, of American nature” (347). Bueschel provides no contextual evidence to support the idea that this was Fitzgerald's intention in naming this character, and he ignores the fact that Henry Clay was a prominent nineteenth-century politician who could have also been an inspiration for the name of this character. This reads as though Bueschel is looking for elements of Fitzgerald's work that he can mold to fit his overall premise. Elsewhere in the chapter, he observes Fitzgerald's negative references toward Yale in The Great Gatsby, concluding that they signify “a largely negative image of Ivy League education” (247) without noting that Fitzgerald's own Princeton educational background may have also influenced his bias against a rival institution. Throughout the chapter, Bueschel shows a shallow knowledge of overall scholarship regarding Fitzgerald's work (indicated by the short list of primarily articles on Fitzgerald's work listed in the bibliography at the end of the book), which seems potentially problematic in omissions like citing comments by Nick Carraway without ever discussing his status as a problematic and unreliable narrator.It is clear upon finishing Bueschel's book that his primary focus and research was more on Sherwood Anderson's life and work and that the other authors included are tangential. However, it is an admirable book in what it attempts to do, and his discussion of writers like Fitzgerald points to underexplored aspects that could be built on and fleshed out more fully by other scholars.

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

Music in the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Unheard Melodies

Reading <i>Tender Is the Night</i> as a Serial Text

F. Scott Fitzgerald's Fiction: “An Almost Theatrical Innocence”

For an author as intimately tied to the twentieth-century American literary canon as F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940), it is remarkable how sweepingly general some assessments of his work have been: he is the Jazz Age writer extraordinaire, lauding and critiquing the era à la Nick Carraway; he is the Depression era burnout, longing for the lost whims of Babylon; he dies a Hollywood hack, paying off his debts while churning away at a series of stories and an unfinished novel that will excoriate the film industry, a lesser form of art in his mind. As with any general appraisal, returning to the author's work provides the palliative to such critical ennui and generalized assessments.David S. Brown, in Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, does not seek to remind us why The Great Gatsby (1925) is (one of) The Great American Novels, nor does he provide an apologia for F. Scott Fitzgerald, the working author, turning out pleasurable fare for the The Saturday Evening Post, about which he always remained conflicted. Instead, Brown tells us his biography will treat Fitzgerald as a “cultural historian” (1), as an author invested in the pressing issues of his day, not necessarily the pressing political issues (indeed, Brown discusses Fitzgerald's scant political commentary throughout), but rather the issues that a postwar generation found themselves facing in an era of unrestrained excess and abandonment. What Brown has provided most successfully is an approach to Fitzgerald that aligns him with other cultural historians, those of his time and those who came before. In addition to examples long noted by Fitzgerald scholars and fans—such as Thorstein Veblen, who had coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to characterize American capitalism at the dawn of the twentieth century and whose ideas are frequently explored by Fitzgerald—Brown also draws upon his historian's perspective to discuss Fitzgerald alongside such luminary thinkers as Frederick Jackson Turner, Oswald Spengler, and the Comte de Buffon. The last example almost seems to strain credulity and reads more as a historian enlightening a general audience about the naturalist's infamous dismissal of a supposedly inferior form of Nature found in North America, but Brown astutely steers the work back to Fitzgerald as he successfully ties Buffon's ideas into a novel analysis of Fitzgerald's anxieties over expatriation and the role of America on the world stage (231–35).As a biographer, Brown is not concerned with digging up fresh anecdotes of Fitzgerald bacchanalia; readers seeking chapter upon chapter of the Fitzgeralds dancing their way through hotel fountains will not find them. Nor will readers seeking hagiography leave satisfied; refusing to shy away from the more desultory moments in Fitzgerald's life, Brown notes Fitzgerald's callousness in some of his extramarital affairs and turns a somewhat sharp eye on Fitzgerald's epistolary relationship with his daughter Scottie. And while the Fitzgerald fan likely knows the broad strokes of his attempts to woo the Alabama belle Zelda Sayre, Brown moves through their courtship quite briefly, and she often disappears for long stretches of the text. Brown is sensitive and sparse, unsparing and unromantic, in his discussions of the author's turbulent life, and a biography that eschews the tawdry and gossipy components is a welcome addition to Fitzgeraldiana.Many of Brown's chapters are in fact extended readings of Fitzgerald's works, often alongside whatever cultural ideal Brown sees Fitzgerald as writing about; he aligns his readings of This Side of Paradise (1920) and some of Fitzgerald's early stories like “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920) alongside a cultural history of flappers and post–World War I America (102–4); specifically, in a discussion of “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (1922), Brown notes how Fitzgerald writes a “powerful condemnation of greed” and a “direct rebuke to the speculative orgy that was already then coming to grip the 1920s” (104). Elsewhere, he provides nuanced readings, not only of the major novels (The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night [1934]), but also of the run of Basil and Josephine stories, as well as the Gwen stories; and, to this reviewer's mind, he offers a more incisive critique of Fitzgerald's play The Vegetable (1923) than one would think imaginable, as he aligns its themes with Fitzgerald's “primary concerns” as an artist (160).Overall, Brown's work is welcoming to both those whose association with Fitzgerald was merely dozing through a high school reading of Gatsby and those who have devoured the entirety of his canon. The historical context does much to complicate our too-simplistic understanding of the Roaring Twenties, a reductive view of the era that some critics have blamed Fitzgerald himself for bolstering. Instead, Brown provides a strong contextual examination of the man and his work without relying too heavily on the twice-told tales of debauchery with which we are familiar.If Brown's biography asks us to interrogate Fitzgerald as a historical artifact, a chronicler of a shifting epoch in American history, I'd Die for You: And Other Lost Stories asks that we reconsider Fitzgerald as a product of the economic environment of the 1920s and 1930s. That Fitzgerald wrote stories for money, stories that he was less than entirely satisfied with, is not news. But while Fitzgerald was keenly attuned to the literary marketplace, that does not mean that he churned out unpolished hackwork. Even the unpublished stories in I'd Die for You show him honing his craft and experimenting with ideas (such as the worlds of film and medicine) that would later come to play important roles in works such as Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon (1941).As an eminently capable editor and chronicler of Fitzgerald's craft, Anne Margaret Daniel has presented a version of Fitzgerald that has escaped popular consciousness. Through her meticulous footnotes and ample textual analysis in the headnotes for each of the volume's selections, Daniel presents a version of Fitzgerald that has been underrated: the painstaking craftsman. Daniel provides, in her introduction, succinct and enticing summaries of the stories, as well as an overview of Fitzgerald's life at the time of their composition. With the exception of the first story in the collection, a humorous tale about a profit-obsessed publisher titled “The I.O.U.,” the stories are from the 1930s and were written in the wake of the great hardships in Fitzgerald's final decade: his relationship with his now-institutionalized wife, his financial burdens, and his complicated thoughts regarding his work in Hollywood. In addition, Daniel has scrupulously annotated the stories, providing explanations of everything from obscure place names to popular songs now largely forgotten to the era's colorful slang. Most important, Daniel's notes are not obtrusive, and her commentary provides vital context for those unaware of the day-to-day details of Fitzgerald's life.While F. Scott Fitzgerald was certainly no stranger to darkness and despair in his works, from Nicole Diver's mental illness and abuse at the hands of her father, to Jay Gatsby's and Myrtle Wilson's sordid deaths, and Braddock T. Washington's desire permanently to imprison innocent men to preserve the secrets of his gaudy wealth, these stories will likely surprise—if not shock—both the casual Fitzgerald fan and the more seasoned veteran. Consider “Salute to Lucy and Elsie,” which at first seems a simple story of generational misunderstandings between a father and his son but quickly turns dark, when the father blackmails his son's best friend for being a corrosive influence on his son, as the friend had been engaged in a series of illicit relationships (indeed, the story is more sexually explicit than most of Fitzgerald's work). The resolution does not hinge upon a new understanding between father and son but instead reveals dismay, disappointment, and a sense of loss. And in the titular story, perhaps the collection's strongest, a mysterious individual named Carley Delannux leads several women astray through a carefully concealed series of lies. An actress who falls in love with him, Atlanta Downs, is hardly a starry-eyed naïf; instead, she is a complex and ambitious character who attempts to pierce Delannux's aloof and distant manner. Delannux is also an atypical Fitzgerald protagonist; while as much a dreamer as Gatsby or Amory Blaine, he is more haunted than the others, and he is nicknamed “Suicide Carley” because of the fates of past women with whom he has been involved. Having written this story after he himself had attempted suicide (and as Daniel notes, while he feared that his wife might attempt the same [89]), Fitzgerald faced stark pushback from editors over the dark content; his unwillingness to tone it down, particularly its bleak ending, led to the story not being published during his lifetime.Another set of stories stems from Fitzgerald's observations of his wife's hospitalizations and treatments. While Tender Is the Night is, of course, the most concentrated fiction on that subject, I'd Die for You contains several other attempts at hospital and doctor stories, replete with medical jargon. While the stories, which include “Nightmare,” “What to Do about It,” “The Women in the House,” and the wonderfully titled “Cyclone in Silent Land,” all incorporate some standard Fitzgerald romance fare, they also frequently depict the darkness surrounding his own relationship to the medical field. The story “Nightmare” depicts three brothers who were institutionalized after each went insane after the 1929 stock market crash, an ample metaphor for the author's depiction of the corrosive effects of wealth elsewhere in his works.A particular treat for readers is the rare opportunity to see Fitzgerald the screenwriter at work. The collection includes several movie treatments that ultimately frustrated and disappointed Fitzgerald because they did not sell and yet sapped his time from other projects. “Gracie at Sea,” a collaboration with George Burns, opens with the author proclaiming that the “general idea” of the story “is dependent upon the thesis that farce and comedy do not hold attention over half an hour” (59). The tale follows a lonely man named George finding himself thrust into an unusual family struggle, as a millionaire has decided that his older daughter must marry before his younger daughter can do so. Shenanigans ensue, and the story follows their struggles until it resolves into a happy ending. It is fully plotted and reads more like a short story than a film treatment, reminding us that film work never came easily to Fitzgerald, who always longed for lost time writing fiction. Another treatment, “Love is A Pain,” is a war story depicting a secret agent for an unnamed side of an unnamed war; it aligns with, as Daniel remarks, “Hollywood's allegedly ‘light-hearted’ war movies of 1938–1940 that refused to name Germany or Hitler as the enemy while making melodramatic love plots their focus” (277). And, because this is F. Scott Fitzgerald we are talking about, the careful reader will not be surprised to find out that Princeton plays a role. And for “Ballet Shoes (Ballet Slippers),” Fitzgerald seems to have drawn upon his wife's interest in ballet for a story about Russian immigrants. The project was for Olga Spessivtseva, whom Fitzgerald had met in North Africa, though like these other efforts, no film would result from it.The collection includes a few other hidden gems on topics not frequently covered in Fitzgerald's work. “The Pearl and the Fur” is an amusing sample of the Gwen stories, roughly based on his daughter Scottie, that Fitzgerald labored at in the 1930s without quite finding the success he had earlier with the Basil and Josephine stories. Its ending, revealing an epiphany-like moment for Gwen, is as heartfelt as the best of those stories and bears more than a passing resemblance to the structure of the tales in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914). Anyone who has even a passing interest or awareness of college sports and the scandals regarding amateurism and eligibility will find “Offside Play” an eerily prescient tale, one that reveals that the bribery and extortion one hears whispers of today was not foreign to college sports a century ago. Another example of unfamiliar Fitzgerald subject matter is his consideration of the Civil War stories in “Thumbs Up” and “Dentist Appointment,” two versions of the same story that would eventually be published as “The End of Hate” (1940). The tale stems from a family legend, Fitzgerald maintained, where an ancestor was strung up by his thumbs as a form of punishment during the Civil War (159–60). The gruesome scene occurs in both versions of the story, although the second halves are wildly different; in the first, the thumbless Confederate veteran Tib Dulany and the Yankee doctor who called for him to be tortured meet in France, where, unbelievably, they encounter the Empress Eugénie, the wife of Emperor Napoleon III, who resolves the pair's conflict. In “Dentist Appointment,” Tib travels west and encounters an Indian attack, resolved when the doctor performs a dental procedure on an Indian chief. While at first one might be tempted to write off these stories as scarcely believable, they are snapshots into Fitzgerald's tenacity as a writer, for he was determined to work and rework the story into a suitable state (ultimately, “The End of Hate” ends on an ever-so-slightly more believable moment as Tib encounters the doctor on the night of Lincoln's assassination). But the two stories are interesting today in that they remind us of Fitzgerald's lifelong fascination with the Civil War and the South even while they show us how doggedly he worked on his material.A question lingers over these stories, the question of why: Why didn't some of these stories get published? Why did others end up in more obscure venues than Fitzgerald's other fare? Thanks to Daniel's careful editing and inclusion of relevant letters from Fitzgerald to the likes of his agent Harold Ober and Saturday Evening Post editor Kenneth Littauer, we can see that the author strove to remain true to his artistic integrity. He refused to compromise on the stories, reminding us, or perhaps informing us, that he did not spend his twilight years as a misanthropic, greedy hack who was willing to sell poor stories that he could have published more easily. Instead, he held fast to convictions about his work, and if at times the pieces he was defending lacked the depth we find in his best stories and novels, so be it. These stories, by and large, read as publishable today, and they reveal an author hard at work, striving for artistic and, yes, financial success. And today, when Fitzgerald continues to infiltrate the public consciousness through film and television shows, these stories remind us of the lingering hold he has on our imaginations. One wonders what he would think of the fact that his vignette “Thank You for the Light” was published in the New Yorker in 2012, some seventy-six years after that magazine rejected it.

Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut, 1920

In The Great Gatsby, Nick Caraway's setting as a narrator is a major innovation of Fitzgerald's work in the novel narrative. Nick is neither a traditional narrator nor a first-person narrator who is completely separated from the author. Its particularity lies in its personal value is to be discussed, but its value judgment is super guiding. Through the role of Nick, Fitzgerald tries to make innovation in form and passes on values in content. As the witness and the narrator of the story, Nick has a comprehensive understanding of the story and characters, and is able to examine the overall situation and judge the value. His firm moral concept and comprehensive perspective make him an important carrier for Fitzgerald to convey ideas and values in the novel.

This paper explores the notion of identity and its manifestations in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, focusing on social context, ethnicity, and racism as main components for identity formation in American society in the 1900s. To support this observation, a focus is made on identity formation, ethnicity, and social acceptance in an elite, racially categorized society that the characters have experienced. The portrayal of American identity within its complexity indicates to several hidden manifestations of societal, cultural and ethnic complexities. This paper employs analytical, inductive, and deductive approaches to compose the analysis. The analysis critiques characters' physical characteristics and prejudiced attitudes, feeding a culture of racism, social belonging, and prejudicial morality. Identity in The Great Gatsby interacts environmentally, demonstrating how identification sets social roles regarding stratification, ethnicity, and acceptance. The analysis examines how forces generate identity prejudice through discriminatory practices and how the characters respond to those forces by emphasizing their cultural and social context. Ethnic and racial prejudices are deeply embedded in the narrative, reflecting biases of American identity in the 1920s. Also, the analysis reveals how fragmented American identity when American Dream conquered the entire critiques about the novel. Finally, this study concludes with valuable insights into identity's complexity, emphasizing moral, social, ethnic, and racial factors shaping American identity in Fitzgerald's work.

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald identified Allan Dwan's parties as a source for chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby, but who was Dwan and how did he influence Fitzgerald's work? An inventive and prolific director, Allan Dwan (1885–1981) was one of the most successful filmmakers of the silent era, combining the skills of an engineer, an artist, and a businessman. Fitzgerald met him in 1923, during a visit to the set of Dwan's movie The Glimpses of the Moon. That summer, he went to Dwan's parties, mingling with Gloria Swanson and the movie crowd, while Dwan accompanied the Fitzgeralds to the opening night of Fitzgerald's play, The Vegetable. By the end of 1924, however, the two parted ways. The reasons why are unclear. Nonetheless, Fitzgerald drew upon Dwan more frequently for his fiction than any other director, in part as the quintessence of all he found gorgeously wrong with Hollywood, in part as a secret double for himself. Dwan was Lois Moran's close friend at the time Fitzgerald met her, and Dwan left his imprint not only on The Great Gatsby but also on “Jacob's Ladder,” “Magnetism,” “Crazy Sunday,” Tender Is the Night, “Two Old Timers,” and possibly The Love of the Last Tycoon.