Structure and Narration in "The Great Gatsby" photo

Structure and Narration in The Great Gatsby

par · Lecture: 9 minutes
  1. Introduction to The Great Gatsby by Francis Scott Fitzgerald: from the Lost Prairies to the Realist Jungle
  2. The Great Gatsby: characters and characterization
  3. The Great Gatsby: the Romantic Quest
  4. Structure and Narration in The Great Gatsby
  5. The ordering of events in The Great Gatsby
  6. The Great Gatsby: an American novel

The Great Gatsby is the third novel of Fitzgerald, published in 1925 after This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922).

Introduction

It was a turning point in Fitzgerald’s literary career because it was to improve on his previous works: he tested new techniques and insisted on the novelty of his enterprise: ‘I want to write something new, something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and ‘intricately patterned’ (letter to Perkins, agent at Scribner’s).

Indeed, Fitzgerald devoted a lot of care and attention to pruning unnecessary passages and tried to introduce editing methods (just like a filmmaker) to re-arrange his story in movie sequences.

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s main innovation was to introduce a first-person narrator and protagonist whose consciousness filters the story’s events.

This device was not a total invention since a character through whose eyes and mind the central protagonist is discovered is to be found in two of Conrad’s books: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.

As usual with this device, the main protagonist remains strange and shady. This technique reinforces the mystery of the characters.

The second advantage is that the mediation of a character-witness permits a play between the real and the imaginary.

This indirect approach is inherited from Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hence, it is difficult to distinguish between true representation and fantasizing. For Emerson, the vision was more important than the real world.

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American Modernism in literature photo

American Modernism in literature

par · Lecture: 8 minutes
  1. Puritanism : a New World Vision
  2. An authentically American Literature
  3. American Literature: a Declaration of Literary Independence
  4. The American Renaissance
  5. American Modernism in literature

Defining the (literary) self and the nation: representative figures

As an aesthetic phenomenon, Modernism refers to a period that ended in the late 1930s to early 1940s.

The term « modernism » was first used in Germany in the 1890s, the period in which Modernism is said to have appeared.

Unlike such terms as Romanticism or Classicism, Modernism does not refer to the qualities of works of art in a particular period: it is based on the idea that works of art represent a rupture, a break with the past.

Historians say that Modernism is the result of the general transformation of society caused by industrialism and technology during the 19th century.

It was in the big urban centres of Europe that the industrial innovations, the social tensions, and the economic problems of modernity were most intensely manifested.

Therefore, it was also in those cities that the first manifestations of modern art appeared.

During the two decades before World War I, the legitimacy and authority of public institutions were decreasing. Those public institutions were no longer universally accepted after World War I and this vacuum was filled by the arts.

Many artists believed it was now the function of art to define and orient the expectations of both the individual and the collectivity. This vision of the function of art reflects an entire moment in the history of Western societies, especially European societies.

Marked by the revolutionary effects of industrialism, this moment in history also reflected the collective belief that conventions and institutions were not eternal: like any social formation in a capitalistic system, those institutions were subject to perpetual change.

At the level of artistic production, this collective consciousness of permanent change found its most radical expression in subversive aesthetic practices.

For instance, in Dada, the creation of Tristan Tzara, expression seems to be based on radical rupture. The « raison d’être » of artistic production was to negate all social and aesthetic conventions. Every artistic work was supposed to be a new and marginal form of expression.

Moreover, every artistic attempt was a form of engagement with social and historical change.

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The American Renaissance photo

The American Renaissance

par · Lecture: 7 minutes
  1. Puritanism : a New World Vision
  2. An authentically American Literature
  3. American Literature: a Declaration of Literary Independence
  4. The American Renaissance
  5. American Modernism in literature

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s literary and philosophical importance in the American Renaissance and after it has always been associated with his lasting influence in two domains of American intellectual and social life:

  • The emergence of an American romantic sensibility.
  • The emergence of a characteristically American conception of individual consciousness and actions.

For the first time in America, Emerson gave full expression to a philosophy of romantic idealism.

He thought that the spiritual and intellectual ideals of the 18th century, the principles of the Age of Reason, had ended in sterility. Emerson’s ethic of self-reliance represents the necessity for the individual to question most of all forms of social conventions and to refuse his ideas by the accepted standards and values of society.

Also, it represents the necessity for the individual to think and act according to his standards.

But this self-reliance can also be interpreted as moral relativism and as a certain cult of individualistic power. Indeed, Emerson’s philosophy does reflect a certain fascination with power.

Very often, he seems to be too enthusiastic about all manifestations of energy, personal force and superior vitality: « Power first. In politics and trade, pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks »: it’s a philosophy of action.

Such ambivalent affirmations show a great deal of the liberating potential of Emerson’s philosophy but evidently, they also hide a dangerously anarchistic potential that can not be denied.

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