Weeks 1 and 2: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925)

Our first novel this semester will be F. Scott Fitzgerald's best-known work, and one of the finest American novels of the modernist period, The Great Gatsby. When the Modern Library ranked the Top 100 English-Language Novels of the 20th Century in 1998, Gatsby came in second, and was the highest-ranking American entry (bookended by James Joyce's Ulysses [#1] and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [#3]), however while the book received positive reviews upon its publication in 1925, it failed to sell as many copies as its predecessors (This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned) and at the time of Fitzgerald's death fifteen years later, it was out of print and virtually forgotten.

The book begins with these iconic lines:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."

and from the get-go we know that we're in the milieu of full-fledged Jazz Age opulence. While we'll see the rhythms and energy of jazz factor into Harlem Renaissance fiction like our next book, Nella Larsen's Passing, for Fitzgerald it's more about the glamorous trappings of that lifestyle: the decadence of a war-weary 20s culture that lived as if there was no tomorrow, flaunting prohibition laws and spending profligately. This valorization of the moneyed classes had roots in his upbringing in prestigious schools, culminating in his time at Princeton, but the sensitive young writer was able to see beyond mere starry-eyed adulation to find sadness and emptiness behind well-cultivated bon vivant personae, as the opening lines to "The Rich Boy" (a short story published one year after Gatbsy) attest:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves.

(These lines, by the way, are often misquoted. Quote/Counterquote offers a great analysis of this common mistake.)

Beyond class, gender plays a major role in shaping the characters we find here and the fates of folks like Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker will give us much to talk about.

Here's our reading schedule for The Great Gatsby:

• Thurs. August 29: chapters 1–3
• Tues. September 3: chapters 4–7 
• Thurs. September 5: chapters 8–9

and a few links to supplemental materials:

• The New York Times review from April 19, 1925: [link]
• Fitzgerald's Times obituary from December 23, 1940: [link]
• Time Magazine's listing for Gatsby as part of its "100 Best English Novels from 1923 to the Present," including a link to their original review: [link] 
• George Remus, Cincinnati's own larger-than-life inspiration for Jay Gatsby: [link]
• Pop Chart Lab offers a poster-sized chart of the novel's character interactions by chapter: [link]

legendary comic Andy Kaufman reads Gatsby in its entirety as part of his act

a dramatization of the same from the Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon

Welcome to Our Class!

Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995)

If you've taken the first half of this course or are familiar with early US* literature in general one thing you might've noticed is that it doesn't really sound all that American. Sure, it's written by Americans and about America, but literature doesn't resoundingly emerge in the US until the early 19th century and even then it's largely beholden to British aesthetics and written in British parlance. Moreover, 19th century writers in the US found themselves woefully behind the example of their British peers: Romanticism, for example, is inaugurated in 1798 with Coleridge and Wordsworth's first edition of Lyrical Ballads, but it takes thirty years for its influence to become evident in the work of Emerson and Poe, and doesn't fully hit its stride — through Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Crane, et al. — until at least fifty years later.

In the transition from the 19th century the 20th, however American authors find their own unique voice. There are are early glimpses of this in the ambitious experiments in language found in Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Hemingway offers this unmitigated praise: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.") and by the turn of the century America's authors are at the forefront of Modernism, with the groundbreaking work of Stein and Lindsay leading the way for iconic work by Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Williams, Moore, Frost, Sandburg, and more between the First and Second World Wars. Moreover, we see America move beyond the hegemony of straight, white male authors to embrace its central melting pot ideology, both during the heyday of Modernism and through its evolution into Postmodernism. Our reading list aims to reflect this complex evolution, offering up canonical texts alongside modern classics from a diverse array of authors representing the breadth of our national experience, and our goal this semester will be to trace that change from beginning to end. 

I'm excited about the work we'll be doing and I hope you will be as well.

* The official name of this course somewhat problematically replicates a common error — one that we'll continue to make throughout the semester for want of a more streamlined adjective. Properly speaking, we are studying US literature of the 20th and 21st centuries and so that's why I've changed the name slightly; "American" literature would encompass the Americas as a whole, or at the very least our North American neighbors Canada and Mexico.**

** [ yes, the footnote has a footnote ] Interestingly in choosing Valeria Luiselli — who was born in Mexico, first moved to the US at the age of 2, attended college in Mexico, and has lived in the US since — I'm pushing even harder against these questions of nomenclature.