In my previous post, I discussed my lecture of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). (I have the slides on Google Docs.) I wrote about the way that Fitzgerald, from the outset, constructs the novel as a facade, the ways that the novel does not accept all of its readers, and I concluded with the ways that the novel pushes back against xenophobic … Read More The Great Gatsby Lecture Part II
+ american literature, Ben Railton, f. scott fitzgerald, jesmyn ward, modernism, nick carraway, nineteenth century literature, stephanie powell watts, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature
For my lecture last fall on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), I decided to focus on the ways that Fitzgerald’s novel does not speak for all of its readers but also how the novel overtly challenges the myth of the American Dream. This challenging of the myth does not only occur with Gatsby. Rather, it occurs from the very beginning of the … Read More The Great Gatsby Lecture
+ american literature, Duke of Buccleuch, f. scott fitzgerald, jardin of versailles, jay gatz, modernism, myrtle wilson, nick carraway, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) challenges the mythology of the American Dream through its multiple layers of the facade that appear throughout the novel. These facades do not merely occur with Gatsby’s house or the rumors surrounding his life. Rather, they appear elsewhere, some even on a meta-level within the text. Today, I want to briefly discuss a few of these instances. … Read More Facades in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”
+ american literature, modernism, playing in the dark, sapphira and the slave girl, toni morrison, twentieth century literature, willa cather
When I was constructing my “Introduction to Modernism” course this semester, I decided to use Ernest J. Gaines’ work as the focal point, moving outwards from his work back into the past and towards he present, not limiting modernist thought to one particular temporal period. I did this, mainly, because Gaines, time and time again, has spoken about the influence of Modernists and Russian … Read More The Problematic Nature of Willa Cather’s Final Novel
+ american literature, ernest hemingway, in our time, language, margaret wright-cleveland, modernism, the battler, twentieth century literature
Last post, I wrote about the ways that Ernest Hemingway highlights the ways that language constructs race in his story “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” There, I examined the ways that Dick Boulton and Henry Adams describe the logs that they pull out of the sand. Are they “stolen” or free for the taking. While Hemingway zeroes in on the ways that Boulton … Read More Language in Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler”
Interminable Rambling 