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