Category: twentieth century literature

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+ african american literature, american literature, citizen: an american lyric, claudia rankine, georgia literature, killers of the dream, lillian e smith, southern literature, twentieth century literature

The “historical self” and the “self self”: Part I

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Last post, I wrote about the ways that racism, subjugation, and history imprisons everyone, the oppressed and the oppressor alike. Today, I want to continue that discussion by looking at Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream and connected her discussion with a couple of the vignettes in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. While Smith focuses, predominately, on the white psyche, Rankine focuses on … Read More The “historical self” and the “self self”: Part I

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+ f. scott fitzgerald, jay gatz, modernism, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature

The Great Gatsby Lecture Part II

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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

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+ american literature, Ben Railton, f. scott fitzgerald, jesmyn ward, modernism, nick carraway, nineteenth century literature, stephanie powell watts, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature

The Great Gatsby Lecture

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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

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+ american literature, Duke of Buccleuch, f. scott fitzgerald, jardin of versailles, jay gatz, modernism, myrtle wilson, nick carraway, the great gatsby, twentieth century literature

Facades in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

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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”

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+ american literature, modernism, playing in the dark, sapphira and the slave girl, toni morrison, twentieth century literature, willa cather

The Problematic Nature of Willa Cather’s Final Novel

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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

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