Great Gatsby Presentations

AGENDA:

Continue Great Gatsby Presentations

AP PRACTICE PACKET #3

Tomorrow: Cookies, cider--- ELF?

HMWK:  Post a comment about the presentations you have seen.  Comment on your peers' work and their responses to the novel.

Great Gatsby Presentations

AGENDA:

The Great Gatsby Presentations begin today

Peer feedback sheets: provide feedback today to two of the presentations. 
Did the presentation show an understanding of the novel in relation to the themes of "The American Dream" or "modernism"? 
How effective was the presentation?

Great Gatsby, American Dream, Modernism

Agenda:

Look at and discuss focus questions from yesterday.

Watch end of movie.

Go over presentations for tomorrow.

Great Gatsby

Agenda:

Go to library to get E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime

Discuss Gatsby criticism:

Focus questions:  In what way is The Great Gatsby a "modern" novel?
How does The Great Gatsby explore the theme of the American Dream?
What examples of irony are evident in The Great Gatsby?



View end of movie

“Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” by Marius Bewley. From The Sewanee Review,

Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America, by Marius Bewley.

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Critics of Scott Fitzgerald lend to agree that The Great Gatsby is somehow a commentary on that elusive phrase, the American dream. The assumption seems to be that Fitzgerald approved. On the contrary, it can be shown that The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream that our literature affords. Read in this way, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece ceases to be a pastoral documentary of the Jazz Age and takes its distinguished place among those great national novels whose profound corrective insights into the nature of American experience arc not separable from the artistic form of the novel itself. That is to say, Fitzgerald—at least in this one book—is in a line with the greatest masters of American prose. The Great Gatsby embodies a criticism of American experience—not of manners, but of a basic historic attitude to life—more radical than anything in James’s own assessment of the deficiencies of his country. The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream.

 ....(About the green light)....

Some might object to this symbolism on the grounds that it is easily vulgarized—as A. J. Cronin has proved. But if studied carefully in its full context it represents a convincing achievement. The tone or pitch of the symbol is exactly adequate to the problem it dramatizes. Its immediate function is that it signals Gatsby into his future, away from the cheapness of his affair with Daisy which he has vainly tried (and desperately continues trying) to create in the image of his vision. The green light is successful because, apart from its visual effectiveness as it gleams across the bay, it embodies the profound naivete of Gatsby’s sense of the future, while simultaneously suggesting the historicity of his hope. This note of historicity is not fully apparent at this point, of course. The symbol occurs several times, and most notably at the end:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Thus the American dream, whose superstitious valuation of the future began in the past, gives the green light through which alone the American returns to his traditional roots, paradoxically retreating into the pattern of history while endeavoring to exploit the possibilities of the future. There is a suggestive echo of the past in Gatsby’s sense of Daisy. He had known her, and fallen in love with her, five years before the novel opens. During that long interval while they had disappeared from each other’s sight, Daisy has become a legend in Gatsby’s memory, a part of his private past through which (as a “mythic” character) he assimilates into the pattern of that historic past through which he would move into the historic future. But the legendary Daisy, meeting her after five years, has dimmed a little in luster:

When, at the end, not even Gatsby can hide his recognition of the speciousness of his dream any longer, the discovery is made in universalizing terms that dissolve Daisy into the larger world she has stood for in Gatsby’s imagination:

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque tiling a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about…

“A new world, material without being real.” Paradoxically, it was Gatsby’s dream that conferred reality upon the world. The reality was in his faith in the goodness of creation, and in the possibilities of life. That these possibilities were intrinsically related to such romantic components limited and distorted his dream, and finally left it helpless in the face of the Buchanans, but it did not corrupt it. When the dream melted, it knocked the prop of reality from under the universe, and face to face with the physical substance at last, Gatsby realized that the illusion was there—there where Tom and Daisy, and generations of small-minded, ruthless Americans had found it—in the dreamless, vision-less complacency of mere matter, substance without form. After this recognition, Gatsby’s death is only a symbolic formality, for the world into which his mere body had been born rejected the gift he had been created to embody—the traditional dream from which alone it could awaken into life.
As the novel closes, the experience of Gatsby and his broken dream explicitly becomes the focus of that historic dream for which he stands. Nick Carraway is speaking:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

It is fitting that this, like so many of the others in Gatsby, should be a moonlight scene, for the history and the romance are one. Gatsby fades into the past forever to take his place with the Dutch sailors who had chosen their moment in time so much more happily than he.
We recognize that the great achievement of this novel is that it manages, while poetically evoking a sense of the goodness of that early dream, to offer the most damaging criticism of it in American literature. The astonishing thing is that the criticism—if indictment wouldn’t be the better word—manages to be part of the tribute. Gatsby, the “mythic” embodiment of the American dream, is shown to us in all his immature romanticism. His insecure grasp of social and human values, his lack of critical intelligence and self-knowledge, his blindness to the pitfalls that surround him in American society, his compulsive optimism, are realized in the text with rare assurance and understanding. And yet the very grounding of these deficiencies is Gatsby’s goodness and faith in life, his compelling desire to realize all the possibilities of existence, his belief that we can have an Earthly Paradise populated by Buchanans. A great part of Fitzgerald’s achievement is that he suggests effectively that these terrifying deficiencies are not so much the private deficiencies of Gatsby, but are deficiencies inherent in contemporary manifestations of the American vision itself—a vision no doubt admirable, but stupidly defenseless before the equally American world of Tom and Daisy. Gatsby’s deficiencies of intelligence and judgment bring him to his tragic death —a death that is spiritual as well as physical. But the more important question that faces us through our sense of the immediate tragedy is where they have brought America.

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“Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” by Marius Bewley. From The Sewanee Review, LXII (Spring 1954). Copyright (c) 1954 by The University of the South. Appeared in an expanded form in The Eccentric Design Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959; London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1959) by Marius Bewley. Reprinted by permission of The Sewanee Review and the author. This essay was slightly changed and enlarged in The Eccentric Design (Columbia University Press, 1959), pp. 259-87. Since the added material is not concerned with The Great Gatsby, / am using the earlier version as the text here.

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MARIUS BEWLEY teaches at Fordham and is the author of The Complex Fate and The Eccentric Design, in which a revised version of the essay in this book is a chapter. The essay as it is printed here appeared in The Sewanee Review.

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Яндекс.Словари

Great Gatsby projects

AGENDA:

• Review task assessment for FINAL GREAT GATSBY PROJECT
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• Work on FINAL PROJECTS for presentations beginning next Wednesday in class
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• HMWK: Be sure to finish the novel for Monday

FINAL PROJECT GREAT GATSBY:

After reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and viewing the movie, create an artistic project from the project list that demonstrates your understanding of the key themes of the novel and its relevance to the modernist movement in art.  Prepare a one-pager that describes the project and provides a rationale for what you created. Present the project to the class during the week of 12/17-12/21.

Symbolism in Gatsby

• Symbolism in The Great Gatsby

  Some important symbols include the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg and the Valley of Ashes located between West Egg and New York City.
  

  1. The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg - The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg cast an ominous shadow over the goings-on in the novel. The symbolism behind the eyes, located on a billboard overlooking the Valley of Ashes, is open to interpretation. George Wilson likens them to the eyes of God. The location of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg looking down on everything that takes place in the Valley of Ashes may represent God looking down on a morally bankrupt wasteland and doing nothing about it. His empty face may represent the modernist notion that God no longer lived, a symbol of the modernists' distrust of political, religious, and social institutions.
  2. The Valley of Ashes - The Valley of Ashes, located between West Egg and New York city represents the moral decay associated with the uninhibited desire for wealth. It symbolizes societal decay and the plight of the poor, victims of greed and corruption. The valley can also be linked to WWI battlefields, where existed a no man's land--full of barbed wire, shrapnel, unexploded mines, and dead bodies--between opposing trenches. World War I influenced the negativity of modernist writers.

• Heat, Automobiles & Eggs

  
  

  le

  1. Heat - The heat becomes oppressive during the climactic scene in the novel. Tom, Daisy, Nick, Jordan, and Gatsby head to the city as tension increases. Nick describes the day as "broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest of the summer" (102). Daisy complains, "It's so hot, and everything's so confused" (106). linking the oppressive heat with the oppressive situation. It's possible, as well, that the heat is, in some way, symbolic of hell and damnation. It is in chapter 7 that Gatsby's dream is crushed and Myrtle Wilson's infidelity is discovered.
  2. Automobiles - Cars have been regarded as status symbols since Henry Ford rolled out the first Model T in the early 20th century. The automobiles driven by Gatsby and Tom Buchanan symbolize their attributes as well: Gatsby's car is gaudy and contains all the latest gadgets. Tom refers to it as a "circus wagon" (108). Tom's drives a coupe, a high-end, traditional, elegant auto. In addition to the two men, automobiles symbolize recklessness as evidenced by Gatsby's recklessness with money and the moral recklessness of Daisy as she barrels into Myrtle Wilson, killing her.

• Color Symbolism

  Some of the color used in The Great Gatsby includes white, grey, yellow, red, and green
  

  1. Green - Don't forget that green is the color of money, that Gatsby states that Daisy's "voice is full of money" (107), a green light shines at the end of Daisy's dock, and that Jay Gatsby desires wealth as a means to get Daisy. The green light is also associated with the American Dream, something Gatsby cannot achieve.
  2. Grey - Everything in the Valley of Ashes is colored with grey dust. It represents lifelessness and hopelessness (see Valley of Ashes on page 1).
  3. White - White normally symbolizes purity. In The Great Gatsby, it represents false purity. Jordan and Daisy, not exactly moral pillars, often wear white. Gatsby wears white when meeting Daisy for the first time in five years to give the impression that he has been pure and good, doubtful considering his life of organized crime and bootlegging.
  4. Yellow/Gold - Yellow represents corruptness. Gatsby's car is yellow, a product of his corrupt dealings, as are the spectacles of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. It's probably not a coincidence that the novel's most impure character is named after a yellow flower. Gold has earned its place among the all time symbols of corruption and greed, although most wouldn't mind having more of it.
  5. Blue - Blue represents illusions. The first suit Gatsby wears is blue. His gardens are blue. He is separated from Daisy by blue and even his chauffeur wears blue. The eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelburg are also blue, Fitzgerald's allusion to the illusion that there was an almighty being watching over everyone, a belief widely attacked by modernist writers. Follow the link for more novel study guides.

Gatsby as Byronic/Romantic Hero?

Byronic hero

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Byron c. 1816, by Henry Harlow

The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both Byron's life and writings have been considered in different ways to exemplify the type. The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818), and was described by the historian and critic Lord Macaulay as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection".^[1] Byron described Conrad, the pirate hero of his The Corsair (1814) as follows:

That man of loneliness and mystery,
Scarce seen to smile, and seldom heard to sigh— (I, VIII)

and

He knew himself a villain—but he deem'd
The rest no better than the thing he seem'd;
And scorn'd the best as hypocrites who hid
Those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
He knew himself detested, but he knew
The hearts that loath'd him, crouch'd and dreaded too.
Lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt: (I, XII)^[2]

History

The initial version of the type in Byron's work, Childe Harold, draws on a variety of earlier literary characters including Hamlet and Goethe's Werther (1774); he was also noticeably similar to René, the hero of Chateaubriand's novella of 1802, although Byron may not have read this.^[3] After Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero made an appearance in many of Byron's other works, including his series of poems on Oriental themes: The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814) and Lara (1814); and his closet play Manfred (1817). The Oriental works show more "swashbuckling" and decisive versions of the type; later Byron was to attempt such a turn in his own life when he joined the Greek War of Independence, with fatal results.^[4] The actual circumstances of his death from disease in Greece were unglamourous in the extreme, but back in Europe these details were ignored in the many works promoting his myth.^[5] In his period as the talk of London, Byron was characterised by Lady Caroline Lamb, later a lover of his, as being "mad, bad, and dangerous to know".^[6]
Byron's influence is manifest in many authors and artists of the Romantic movement and writers of Gothic fiction during the 19th century. Lord Byron was the model for the title character of Glenarvon (1816) by Byron's erstwhile lover Lady Caroline Lamb; and for Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre (1819) by Byron's personal physician, Polidori. Claude Frollo from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Edmond Dantes from Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844),^[7], Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), and Rochester from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) are other later 19th-century examples of Byronic heroes.
Scholars have also drawn parallels between the Byronic hero and the solipsist heroes of Russian literature. In particular, Alexander Pushkin's famed character Eugene Onegin echoes many of the attributes seen in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, particularly, Onegin's solitary brooding and disrespect for traditional privilege. The first stages of Pushkin's poetic novel Eugene Onegin appeared twelve years after Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and Byron was of obvious influence (Vladimir Nabokov argued in his Commentary to Eugene Onegin that Pushkin had read Byron during his years in exile just prior to composing Eugene Onegin).^[8] The same character themes continued to influence Russian literature, particularly after Mikhail Lermontov invigorated the Byronic hero through the character Pechorin in his 1839 novel A Hero of Our Time.^[9]
The Byronic hero is also featured in many contemporary novels, and it is clear that Byron's work continues to influence modern literature as the precursor of a commonly-encountered type of antihero. Erik, the Phantom from Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera (1909–1910) is another well-known example from the early twentieth century.

Characteristics

The Byronic hero typically exhibits several of the following traits:^[10]

• Arrogant
• Cunning and able to adapt
• Cynical
• Disrespectful of rank and privilege
• Emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody
• Having a distaste for social institutions and norms
• Having a troubled past or suffering from an unnamed crime
• Intelligent and perceptive
• Jaded, world-weary
• Mysterious, magnetic and charismatic
• Rebellious
• Seductive and sexually attractive
• Self-critical and introspective
• Self-destructive
• Socially and sexually dominant
• Sophisticated and educated
• Struggling with integrity
• Treated as an exile, outcast, or outlaw

NOTES ON THE BYRONIC HERO
Romantic poet Lord Byron (George Gordon) is credited with the development of the prototypical anti-hero, referred to as the Byronic hero. Like Childe Harold in Byron’s popular Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero is a larger-than-life, but flawed character who could be considered, by traditional standards, to be a rebel. Typically the Byronic hero:
• exhibits conflicting emotions and excessive moodiness;
 • is passionate about a particular issue; • can be introspective and critical of himself;
• struggles with his own sense of integrity;
• operates largely within his own set of rules and principles;
• rejects accepted codes and norms of society;
• is fiercely independent and strongly individual;
• is a loner (whether imposed by society or self-imposed);
• displays a lack of respect for rank and privilege;
• has a troubled or mysterious past;
• can be cynical, demanding, and arrogant;
• exhibits self-destructive tendencies and behavior.



How does Gatsby function as a Byronic Hero?

The American Dream

A study of The Great Gatsby must include a look at The American Dream.

1. A look at The Great Gatsby and the American Dream shows that the quality of the dream had diminished, according to Fitzgerald, and had therefore corrupted American society in the 20's.
2. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness established the foundation of the American Dream. The ability of common people to own property and grow wealthy through hard work constituted another important aspect of the dream. For Jay Gatsby, all these things are embodied in Daisy Buchanan.
3. The dream, according to Fitzgerald, however, had become corrupted by the desire for ease and comfort. Gatsby's dream is not realized, not due to a lack of trying, but because the dream itself was not worth achieving, much in the same way the object of the American Dream in the 1920s--ease and material objects--was also not worth achieving.
4. Gatsby's quest for the American Dream is also symbolized by his longing to repeat the past, to relive greatness from another era, much in the same way that the American Dream as established by the founding fathers could not be revitalized in the hearts of Americans.
5. Fitzgerald's cynicism and negative views of his society are representative of modernist writers.

Wealth and Money

A study of The Great Gatsby must include a look at wealth and money.

Quiz on Gatsby

tomorrow there will be a quiz on Gatsby as well as discussion.

Read through Ch. 5 and prepare 3 Questions and 3 Observations about the story for tomorrow.

Possible Gatsby project ideas:

REARRANGE A PASSAGE AS A "FOUND" POEM. Find a particularly effective description or bit of action that is really poetry written as prose. Rewrite it. Leave out words or skip a sentence or two, but arrange it to create a poem.

WRITE A PARODY OF THE BOOK. This kind of humorous imitation appeals to many students. Parody the entire book or one scene.

CREATE A DOSSIER ON A CHARACTER. Pretend that you are a foreign spy sent to report on your chosen character. Compile into a secret file general and specific information regarding your character. Don't forget the photo.

DESIGN AND PRODUCE A POSTCARD OR A SERIES OF POSTCARDS. On one side draw/paint/reproduce an appropriate photo and on the other side compose a message to me from one of the characters. There will be automatic A's for the best design, most intriguing message, most distant postmark, and most appropriate postmark (mail it to me from there!).

MAKE A NEW BOOK JACKET. It should include an attractive picture or cover design, an original summary of the book, information on the author and illustrator, and information about other books by the author.

DO A DRAMATIC READING (READER'S THEATER) OF A SCENE. Select the scene and ask friends to help read it dramatically.

CONVERT A BOOK INTO A PUPPET SHOW. Make simple puppets (stick puppets, finger puppets, paper bag puppets, and so on) or complex puppets (marionettes) and present the story or an exciting scene from it.

DO A "YOU ARE THERE" news program reporting on a particular scene, character, or event in the book.

WRITE AND STAGE A TELEVISION SERIES EPISODE. Think of a popular television series that a book or part of it would fit. Then convert it to that series and give the segment before the class.

INTERVIEW A CHARACTER FROM A BOOK. Prepare questions to give another student. The reader assumes the role of the character in the book and answers the questions as that character.

THE WRITTEN WORD VERSUS THE VIDEO. Compare the book to the movie or television version of it. What aspects of the book have been altered for the visual performance and why? Do these alterations make the story "better"? Why or why not?

RETURN TO THE FUTURE. Pretend that you are one of the characters who has "come back" 25 years after the novel has ended. Describe your reactions.

DESIGN THE ILLUSTRATIONS FOR THE BOOK.

MUSIC

MOVIE TRAILER

Gatsby Readings!!!

Please read through Ch. 4 pg. 85.

Post links to your Wallwishers here.  Post them tonight!

The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

Agenda:

The Roaring Twenties!

Break into groups of approx. 4 people and work on creating a portrait of images, videos, icons, and info for your topic.

Ms. Moraites' portrait of the 1920s http://wallwisher.com/wall/gatsbyand1920s


*American Society of the 1920s

*The American Dream

*The Lost Generation – F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda

*Art Movements of the 1920s


Share with the class the highlights of your topic.

Homework:
1. Continue to read
2. What emerging theme do you see in The Great Gatsby? Post an answer on the wall link below:

http://wallwisher.com/wall/themesofgatsby

Gatsby

The Great Gatsby: Examining the Introduction

Agenda:

1. Work in small groups on the following discussion questions about The Great Gatsby. Post your answers in a comment for credit (include the names of the people in your group).

Gatsby Discussion Questions

1. In the beginning of Chapter I, the narrator of the novel, Nick Carraway, reflects on the concept of judgment while providing the reader with information about his personal history. As Nick writes, "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 you've had'" (Fitzgerald 1). Is Nick consistent on this point? Would you consider him a reliable narrator?

2. As Nick reflects on the concept of judgment in the early portion of the first chapter, he provides some information about his family history and personal background. Ironically--even though Nick is the narrator--this is some of the most in-depth information that the reader will get about Nick's history. Why do you think Nick provides so little information about himself? What does he focus on instead of himself? What effect does this have on the reader?

3. How does the novel characterize the idea of East v. West? Discuss this both in terms of East and West Egg (if you are not sure what these are, you may want to search for them) as well as in terms of the East and West of the United States. For what does each become a symbol?

4. Discuss the imagery that you see in the first chapter of the novel. Discuss both the imagery used to describe the mansions (that of Gatsby and that of the Buchanans) and the imagery used to introduce the various characters. When it comes to the characters, how does this imagery shape the reader's opinion of them?

5. Specifically consider the introduction of Daisy. What is Daisy like? Do her actions and words deserve the praise with which Nick showers her? Why or why not?

West Egg versus East Egg

Introducing The Great Gatsby

Introducing The Great Gatsby

Today will be our first foray into The Great Gatsby. We will be going over some historical background information pertaining to the text as well as starting a conversation about the theme of the American Dream--something that you will want to keep in mind for your end-of-unit projects.


Homework for Monday:
*Read pp. 1-59

*Read and mark up the essay below. Answer the questions attached to it for homework credit (for full credit you should write roughly a paragraph for each).

*Watch some of the attached video clips if you were not in class and missed them (you will need them to do the short answers).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_g-0u1wfNc (from the beginning to 8:43)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_liemIeSDk&feature=related (3:00-3:30; 4:30-5:30; 7:35-8:40; 9:30-end)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHvmn7Fb05I&feature=related (0:00-:30; 1:23-2:18; 2:39-4:55)



Michel-Guillaume-Jean De Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 1783
Crevecoeur was a Frenchman who had served with Montcalm in the French and Indian War and in 1765 decided to remain in the New World. For the next fifteen years, he farmed land in Orange County, New York and wrote his Letters from an American Farmer. The following excerpt is from his third and most famous letter, "What is an American?" Adapted from: http://staff.jccc.net/vclark/doc8_1_1.htm.

Directions: Read and mark up this essay. Complete the questions that follow for homework credit.


I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent....
He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess every thing, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.
Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida. We are a people of cultivators, scattered over an immense territory, communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws without dreading their power, because they are equitable. We are all animated with the spirit of industry, which is unfettered, and unrestrained, because each person works for himself. If he travels through our rural districts, he views not the hostile castle, and the haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabbin, where cattle and men help to keep each other warm, and dwell in meanness, smoke, and indigence. A pleasing uniformity of decent competence appears throughout our habitations. The meanest of our log-houses is a dry and comfortable habitation. Lawyer or merchant are the fairest titles our towns afford; that of a farmer is the only appellation of the rural inhabitants of our country. It must take some time ere he can reconcile himself to our dictionary, which is but short in words of dignity, and names of honour. There, on a Sunday, he sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble waggons. There is not among them an esquire, saving the unlettered magistrate. There he sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labour of others. We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are. Many ages will not see the shores of our great lakes replenished with inland nations, nor the unknown bounds of North America entirely peopled. Who can tell how far it extends? Who can tell the millions of men whom it will feed and contain? for no European foot has as yet traveled half the extent of this mighty continent! ...
In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes; to what purpose, should they ask one another, what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came. Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by want, hunger, and war: but now, by the power of transplantation, like all other plants, they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they were not numbered in any civil list of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible power has this surprising metamorphosis been performed? By that of the laws, and that of their industry. The laws, the indulgent laws, protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen; and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws. From whence proceed these laws? From our government. Whence that governments It is derived from the original genius and strong desire of the people ratified and confirmed by government. This is the great chain which links us all, this is the picture which every province exhibits, Nova Scotia excepted. There the crown has done all; either there were no people who had genius, or it was not much attended to: the consequence is, that the province is very thinly inhabited indeed; the power of the crown, in conjunction with the musketos, has prevented men from settling there. Yet some part of it flourished once, and it contained a mild harmless set of people. But for the fault of a few leaders the whole were banished. The greatest political error the crown ever committed in America, was to cut off men from a country which wanted nothing but men!
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him: his country is now that which gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: Ubi panis ibi patria, is the motto of all emigrants. What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a man, whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.
Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great change in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry, which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle. The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of population which has ever appeared, and which will hereafter become distinct by the power of the different climates they inhabit. The American ought, therefore, to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? Wives and children, who before in vain demanded of him a morsel of bread, now, fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and to clothe them all; without any part being claimed, either by a despotic prince, a rich abbot, or a mighty lord. Here religion demands but little of him; a small voluntary salary to the minister, and gratitude to God; can he refuse these? The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.

Homework Questions:

1. What would Crevecoeur describe as the American Dream? Point to textual evidence and the stylistic devices that he employs to get this across (remember that such analysis can also be done of non-fiction).

2. Do you agree with him? Why or why not?

3. What is the American Dream as it is presented in the video clips about F. Scott Fitzgerald and the 1920s? How does this mesh with Crevecoeur’s dream? How this conflict with it? Why do you think it meshes/conflicts?

4. What do you believe is the American Dream now?

Modernism

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americannovel/timeline/modernism.html

A Brief Guide to Modernism
"That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" —from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change "on or about December 1910." The statement testifies to the modern writer's fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence. "On or about 1910," just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein's ideas were transforming our perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms: Matisse and Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war's end in 1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the "American Century" had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting this change were a handful of American poets. Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made "Make it new!" his battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot, who wrote what is arguably the most famous poem of the twentieth century--The Waste Land--using revolutionary techniques of composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned to untraditional sources for inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and Eliot to the ironic poems of the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) followed Pound to Europe and wrote poems that, in their extreme concision and precise visualization, most purely embodied his famous doctrine of imagism. Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens--a mild-mannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut--had a flair for the flashiest titles that poems have ever had: "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle." Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its ability to "press back against the pressure of reality." What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use of quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image. What was new in E. E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the words were in lower-case letters and a parenthesis "(a leaf falls)" may separate the "l" from "oneliness." William Carlos Williams wrote in "plain American which cats and dogs can read," to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. "No ideas but in things," he proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or events--a red wheelbarrow, a person eating plums--with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem's subject matter can be. Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favored traditional devices--blank verse, rhyme, narrative, the sonnet form--but he, too, had a genius for the American vernacular, and his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as a peculiarly modern figure who is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee sage. Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem capable of encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more notably successful. In his poem "The Bridge," the Brooklyn Bridge is both a symbol of the new world and a metaphor allowing the poet to cross into different periods, where he may shake hands in the past with Walt Whitman and watch as the train called the Twentieth Century races into the future. Modernism in Literature: Quick Overview Don't confuse the Modernists movement with the standard dictionary definition of modern. Modernism in Literature is not a chronological designation; rather it consists of literary work possessing certain loosely defined characteristics. What is Modernism? The following are characteristics of Modernism: Marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views. Belief that the world is created in the act of perceiving it; that is, the world is what we say it is. There is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative. No connection with history or institutions. Their experience is that of alienation, loss, and despair. Championship of the individual and celebration of inner strength. Life is unordered. Concerned with the sub-conscious. British & Irish Modernism The horrors of World War I (1914-19), with its accompanying atrocities and senselessness became the catalyst for the Modernist movement in literature and art. Modernist authors felt betrayed by the war, believing the institutions in which they were taught to believe had led the civilized world into a bloody conflict. They no longer considered these institutions as reliable means to access the meaning of life, and therefore turned within themselves to discover the answers. Their antipathy towards traditional institutions found its way into their writing, not just in content, but in form. Popular British Modernists include the following: James Joyce (from Dublin, Ireland) - His most experimental and famous work, Ulysses, completely abandons generally accepted notions of plot, setting, and characters. Ford Madox Ford - The Good Soldier examines the negative effect of war. Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse, as well, strays from conventional forms, focusing on Stream of Consciousness. Stevie Smith - Novel on Yellow Paper parodies conventionality. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World protests against the dangers and nature of modern society. D.H. Lawrence - His novels reflected on the dehumanizing effect of modern society. T.S. Eliot - Although American, Eliot's The Wasteland is associated with London and emphasizes the emptiness of Industrialism. American Modernism Known as "The Lost Generation" American writers of the 1920s Brought Modernism to the United States. For writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, World War I destroyed the illusion that acting virtuously brought about good. Like their British contemporaries, American Modernists rejected traditional institutions and forms. American Modernists include: Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises chronicles the meaningless lives of the Lost Generation. Farewell to Arms narrates the tale of an ambulance driver searching for meaning in WWI. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby shows through its protagonist, Jay Gatsby, the corruption of the American Dream. John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, and Sherwood Anderson are other prominent writers of the period.		Shop & Support Poets.org Audio Archive Anthology, Volume III The third volume in the incredibly popular Audio Archive Anthology series features 21 poems read by some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. $12.00 $9.00 | More Info View All Store Items Share Digg StumbleUpon Facebook E-mail to Friend

Eliot, O'Connor, Hemingway

Eliot, O'Connor and Hemingway

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.[3] The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.


Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, Eliot studied philosophy at the Sorbonne for a year, then won a scholarship to Oxford in 1914, becoming a British citizen when he was 39. "[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England," he said of his nationality and its role in his work. "It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." Eliot completely renounced his citizenship to the United States and said: "My mind may be American but my heart is British".

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short-story writer and essayist. An important voice in American literature, O'Connor wrote two novels and 32 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern writer who often wrote in a Southern Gothic style and relied heavily on regional settings and grotesque characters. O'Connor's writing also reflected her own Roman Catholic faith, and frequently examined questions of morality and ethics.

Regarding her emphasis of the grotesque, O'Connor said: "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic."[6] Her texts usually take place in the South and revolve around morally flawed characters, while the issue of race often appears in the background. One of her trademarks is foreshadowing, giving a reader an idea of what will happen far before it happens. Most of her works feature disturbing elements, though she did not like to be characterized as cynical. "I am tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man brutal and sarcastic," she writes. "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism... when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror."
Her two novels were Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). She also published two books of short stories: A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (published posthumously in 1965).The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, named in honor of O'Connor by the University of Georgia Press, is a prize given annually to an outstanding collection of short stories. O'Connor was the first fiction writer born in the twentieth century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America




 Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)


Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American author and journalist. His distinctive writing style, characterized by economy and understatement, influenced 20th-century fiction, as did his life of adventure and public image. He produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway's fiction was successful because the characters he presented exhibited authenticity that resonated with his audience. Many of his works are classics of American literature. He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works during his lifetime; a further three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After leaving high school he worked for a few months as a reporter for The Kansas City Star, before leaving for the Italian front to become an ambulance driver during World War I, which became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms. He was seriously wounded and returned home within the year. In 1922 Hemingway married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives, and the couple moved to Paris, where he worked as a foreign correspondent. During his time there he met and was influenced by modernist writers and artists of the 1920s expatriate community known as the "Lost Generation". His first novel, The Sun Also Rises, was written in 1924.

After divorcing Hadley Richardson in 1927 Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer; they divorced following Hemingway's return from covering the Spanish Civil War, after which he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940, but he left her for Mary Welsh Hemingway after World War II, during which he was present at D-Day and the liberation of Paris.
Shortly after the publication of The Old Man and the Sea in 1952 Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where he was almost killed in a plane crash that left him in pain or ill-health for much of the rest of his life. Hemingway had permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and '40s, but in 1959 he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.


Source: Wikipedia

More Modernist short stories/ Southern Gothic

A Good Man is Hard to Find

Today we will be reading a short story by Flannery O'Connor in the Southern Gothic tradition (remember William Faulkner?)---
 

Here is the link to the story.  Read it silently and look over the background and questions for discussion
for today and tomorrow.

pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html 

About Flannery O'Connor:
topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/flannery_oconnor/index.html

A Good Man is Hard to Find Questions

Bring on the tough stuff - there’s not just one right answer.

1. All right, we've got to ask it: do you think the moment of grace is a moment of grace? Why or why not? How does the story change if it isn't?
2. If the grandmother's moment of grace isn't actually a moment of grace, what is it? And how do you interpret The Misfit's reaction to it?
3. Could the grandmother have something like the moment of grace without bringing God into the picture? How would that change the story?
4. If you do read the moment of grace as a real moment of grace or something like it, how responsible was she for it, and how responsible was the situation, The Misfit, or even God? Why does she receive it when she does?
5. Even if you read the grandmother's gesture as a moment of grace, does this moment lose its meaning since she dies right afterward?
6. How much do you think the story's meaning depends upon the religious perspective of the author? How much do you think it depends on the religious perspective of the reader? Is the author the best person to say what the story means? What does it mean to describe what the story "means"?
7. If you don't read the story religiously, does it work as well as a story? Does it have a message? Does it have as clear of a structure? How would you judge that? (Try to answer this question even if it isn't the way you read the story).
8. What's the grandmother really like? Is she a manipulative genius? A superficial and selfish woman? A rather average grandmother, with her share of human faults? A positively lovely lady? Does she remind you of other people you know?
9. Are any of O'Connor's characters sympathetic? Is the grandmother sympathetic? The Misfit?
10. Is the story hopeful or cynical? How do you feel at the end?
11. Why does The Misfit not order the grandmother into the woods with Bobby Lee and Hiram? Would he have done it anyway if he hadn't shot her first?
12. Given how much of the story seems to center on the grandmother and The Misfit, what do we do with the other characters? Are they just there for show or comic relief? Can it be a hopeful story if they die?
13. How do you think The Misfit sees the grandmother throughout the story? By the end? How, if at all, does she affect him?
14. Is The Misfit a believable character, and a believable personification of evil? Why or why not?
15. Could a grandfather have filled the role of the grandmother in the story?

"A Rose for Emily" / "A Clean Well-Lighted Place"

 Link to story:

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html

"A Clean Well-Lighted Place" by Ernest Hemingway
www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html

"A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty
www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/41feb/wornpath.htm

Wilderness Essay and As I Lay Dying Essay

Finish your Wallace Stegner essay today.

As I Lay Dying assignments are due MONDAY, NOV. 26!

More about The Wilderness Idea

Wallace Stegner: The Wilderness Idea

November 4th, 2010 by David Leland Hyde Leave a reply »

Steamboat Rock, Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, 1955 by Philip Hyde. Made on Philip Hyde's second trip to Dinosaur National Monument. In the book, "This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country And Its Magic Rivers" with Forward, first chapter and editing by Wallace Stegner and photographs by Philip Hyde, Martin Litton and others, the Sierra Club used this horizontal photograph and cropped it to less than square, nearly a vertical. There was a vertical version of the photograph but it was not used in the book. This is still today Philip Hyde's most widely published photograph.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)
Any photographer of the natural scene is wise to care deeply about the preservation of wilderness, otherwise some day he or she could wake up some bright “magic hour” morning to discover there are no natural places left to photograph. Maybe it will not happen that rapidly, but many who have been exploring the outdoors for decades have already noticed the shrinking of the wilderness and the changing of places that were once somewhat wild.
In today’s society, appearances would have us believe that we have learned to live without nature. However, scientific evidence links much of our society’s dysfunction to lack of contact with the natural world. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Wallace Stegner wrote the forward and helped compile and edit the first book published for an environmental cause, This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers with photographs by Philip Hyde and Martin Litton. Wallace Stegner was also an advocate for wilderness on many other fronts throughout his writing life. He worked on several books in the groundbreaking Sierra Club Exhibit Format Series and many of the campaigns that defined modern environmentalism. Edward Abbey was Wallace Stegner’s student at Stanford. Here is a quote from Wallace Stegner’s famous letter–statement called The Wilderness Idea excerpted from A Sense of Place by Wallace Stegner:

The wilderness idea has helped form our character and has shaped our history as a people. It has no more to do with recreation than churches have to do with recreation. Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases, if we drive the few remaining species into zoos, or to extinction, if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country, from the noise, the exhaust, the stinks of human and automotive waste, and so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite life, the brave new world of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved, as much of it as is still left and as many kinds because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in 10 years set foot in it. It is good for us when we are young because of the incomparable sanity it can bring briefly as vacation and rest into our insane lives. It is important to us when we are old simply because it is there. Important that it is, simply as idea. The frontier was necessary. For an American, insofar as he is new any different at all, is a civilized man who has renewed himself in the wild.

For a tribute to Philip Hyde’s landscape photography and its role in wilderness preservation see the blog post, “Celebrating Wilderness By William Neill.”
Why do you think we need wilderness? Is it important for landscape photographers to care about wilderness preservation?