Transcript ENGL1001 – American Literature F. Scott Fitzgerald – The

ENGL1001 – American Literature
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great
Gatsby (1926)
Dr. John Masterson
6th Lecture
July-August 2011
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Image of Nick Carraway and Jordan Baker from 1974 Film
Adaptation Of The Great Gatsby – Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Sign in
Background
Poster for the 1974 Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1
• “‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom
violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist
about things. Have you read The Rise of the
Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? … Well,
it’s a fine book and everyone ought to read it.
The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will
be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific
stuff; it’s been proved … This fellow has worked
out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the
dominant race, to watch out or these other races
will have control of things.’”
19th Century Race Science
Image from Nazi Concentration Camp
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• Tom - “’Nowadays people begin by
sneering at family life and family
institutions, and next they'll throw
everything overboard and have
intermarriage between black and
white.’”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 1
• “Something was making him
nibble at the edge of stale
ideas as if his sturdy physical
egotism no longer nourished
his peremptory heart.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9
• “I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw
that what he had done was, to him, entirely
justified. It was all very careless and confused.
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy –
they smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money or their
vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept
them together, and let other people clean up
the mess they had made …”
George Orwell, 1984
Stalin and Hitler
Michel Foucault
Image of the Panopticon in Practice
Description of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg
Sign, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 2
•“some wild wag of an
oculist [in order] to
fatten his practice in the
borough of Queens.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 8
• 'I said “God knows what you've been doing,
everything you've been doing. You may fool me,
but you can't fool God!'”
• 'Standing behind him, Michaelis saw with a shock
that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J.
Eckleburg, which had just emerged, pale and
enormous, from the dissolving night.
• 'God sees everything,' repeated Wilson.
• 'That's an advertisement,' Michaelis assured him.
Something made him turn away from the window
and look back into the room. But Wilson stood
there a long time, his face close to the window
pane, nodding into the twilight.”
Fitzgerald’s definition of ‘The Jazz Age’
•“a generation grown
up to find all Gods
dead, all wars fought,
all faiths in man
shaken.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7
• Daisy to Gatsby - “You
resemble the
advertisement of the man
... You know the
advertisement of the man.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 9
•“He had shown it so
often that I think it was
more real to him now
than the house itself.”
Images from the 1974 Film Adaptation of The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald quoted in Andrew Wanning,
‘Fitzgerald and His Brethren’
• “All the stories that came into my head had a
touch of disaster in them – the lovely young
creatures in my novels went to ruin, the
diamond mountains of my short stories blew
up, my millionaires were as beautiful and
damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants. In life
these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was
pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless
business these people thought.”
William Troy, ‘Scott Fitzgerald – the
Authority of Failure’ • “[In Gatsby] Fitzgerald was able to isolate one
part of himself, the spectatorial or aesthetic,
and also the more intelligent and responsible,
in the person of the ordinary but quite
sensible narrator, from another part of
himself, the dream-ridden romantic
adolescent from St. Paul and Princeton, in the
person of the legendary Jay Gatsby.”
Edmund Wilson – ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’
• “Fitzgerald is partly Irish and … brings
both to life and to fiction certain qualities
that are not Anglo-Saxon. For, like the
Irish, Fitzgerald is romantic, BUT ALSO
cynical about romance; he is bitter as
well as ecstatic; astringent as well as
lyrical. He casts himself in the role of
playboy, yet at the playboy he incessantly
mocks.”
The Great Gatsby, Chapter 5
•Daisy - “It makes me sad
because I’ve never seen
such – such beautiful
shirts before.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Andrew Wanning, ‘Fitzgerald and His
Brethren’
• “The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best
novel because here the congruity of story
and style and attitude is closest and most
meaningful. Here he had a story whose
central character not only symbolized his
own conflicts and confusions, but made a
moving commentary on a period and a
country as well.”