Camelia EliasCamelia Elias

American Studies

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

• Born in St. Paul in 1896.• was always conscious of class

differences.• Mother’s family: Irish, fairly

well-to-do• Father: failed businessman

and salesman

schooling

• Catholic boarding school in NJ (1911-13)• entered Princeton (1915)

– involved in campus literary magazine and wrote scripts for campus musical productions

• was always acutely conscious of the class differences between himself and other Princeton students

• not a great student

Zelda• the daughter of a Supreme Court judge– a debutante and great beauty

• initially rebuffed Fitz’s advances, but then changed her mind and they became engaged

• war ended before Fitz could go overseas– he goes to NYC to work in advertising

to make money to marry Z• she calls off the engagement

ambitions

• Fitzgerald quit his job, moved back to Minnesota where he spent the next several months revising the novel that would be published as This Side of Paradise– The novel published in March 1920: instant best-seller and

fame for Fitzgerald; Zelda marries him 8 days later.

• he begins his life-long association with The Saturday Evening Post and becomes perhaps the best-paid writer of his generation (mostly for short stories)

Scott and Zelda

• The Jazz Age socialites• they became the

embodiment of the excesses of the 1920s

aesthetics

• “Let me make a general observation—the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example be able to see things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

(The Great Gatsby)

the rich vs. the poor• “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are

different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.”

(The Great Gatsby)

anticipationsLetter to Maxwell Perkins, 10 April 1925

• “The book comes out today and I am overcome with fears and forebodings. Supposing women didn’t like the book because it has no important woman in it, and critics didn’t like it because it dealt with the rich and contained no peasants out of Tess in it and set to work in Idaho?”

Fitzgerald on Gatsby

• “The worst fault in it, I think it is a BIG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the Catastrophe. However the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it—tho everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name.”

reception

“F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Latest A Dud”—New York World headline

Springfield Republican

• “A little slack, a little soft, more than a little artificial. The Great Gatsby falls into the class of negligible novels.”

Milwaukee Journal

• “The Great Gatsby is decidedly contemporary: today it is here, tomorrow—well, there will be no tomorrow. It is only as permanent as a newspaper story, and as on the surface.”

Edwin Clark, New York Times Book Review

• “With sensitive insight and keen psychological observation, Fitzgerald discloses in these people a meanness of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalties. He cannot hate them, for they are dumb in their insensate selfishness, and only to be pitied. The philosopher of the flapper has escaped the mordant, but he has turned grave. A curious book, a mystical, glamorous story of today. It takes a deeper cut at life than hitherto has been enjoyed by Mr. Fitzgerald. He writes well—he always has—for he writes naturally, and his sense of form is becoming perfected.”

First Edition

• First scene• Daisy and Gatsby• montage

delineating character1. naming; 2. description of physical appearance, including dress; 3. association with objects, surroundings, possessions, or with 4. images directly introduced by the narrator; 5. direct discussion and analysis of the character by the narrator; 6. actions and behavior, whether described or represented; 7. talk by the character, including

– talk as action or performance (lying, boasting, betraying, flattering)

– talk as self-defining via vocabulary, dialect, rhetoric– self-analysis by the character, whether accurate or not.

8. talk about the character by others, accurate or not. – Such talk both characterizes the talker and the character talked

about.

9. representation or description of the character’s thoughts.

point of view

First person• Only one "character" in the story is described as "I." • All action is filtered through the thoughts and values of this

character, who may be trustworthy—or may not.Second person• Rare, but used in contemporary writing. • "You" is the primary form of address here, resulting in work

which tends to sound very colloquial.Third person• Can be omniscient (see inside and report on thoughts of all

the characters), limited omniscient (see inside only one mind), or not omniscient at all. "He," "she," are the primary forms of address.

point of view 2

There are many continua along which a point of view may be described but the chief are:

1) degree of knowledge of the action;2) degree of understanding of the action;3) degree of participation in the action.

• “He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.” (52-53)

Jay Gatsby

• embodies ‘disastrous’ tensions– desires to enter the social world of the rich, but

does not want to participate in it– stays a romantic, while critiquing the world of the

one that instills romantic feelings in him– has a transfiguring vision for the future, but wants

to invest in the past

Ernest Miller Hemingway (1899- 1961)

biography

• born in Oak Park, Illinois. • after graduating from high school, he worked briefly

as a newspaper reporter, before volunteering as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.

• he later was severely wounded in this war after he transferred to the infantry.

• after the war, he moved to Paris and was influenced by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

• The Sun Also Rises(1926) was Hemingway's first critically acclaimed novel.

biography

• spent time in Key West, Florida, Spain, and Africa after 1927.

• was a war correspondent from 1936-1939 during the Spanish Civil War.

• after the war, Hemingway moved to Havana, Cuba, and in 1958 moved to Idaho.

• His death was thought to be a suicide.

TO WRITE WELL, YOU SHOULD EXPERIENCE FIRST HAND

THE SUBJECT ABOUT WHICH YOU WRITE

writings

• The Sun also Rises (1926) – describes members of the "Lost Generation“ "Lost Generation“– young disillusioned men of the post World War I era.

• A Farewell to Arms (1929)– regarded as Hemingway's next important work.

• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) – chronicles the loss of freedom in the Spanish Civil War.

• The Old Man and the Sea (1953) – is the famous short novel about a Cuban fisherman and his

quest to finally capture a huge fish.

Hemingway’s achievements

• although his prose seems a bit simple to the uninitiated, it is actually a direct way of telling a complex story.

• Hemingway is regarded as one of the finest American authors.

• he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 (for Old Man and the Sea) and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

‘lost generation’ vs. simple protagonists

• depiction of the lives of two types of people. – 1. men and women deprived of faith in the moral

values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs.

– 2. men of simple character and primitive emotions: prizefighters and bullfighters

• depiction of futile battles against circumstances

The Sun also Rises

• the story of a group of morally irresponsible Americans and Britons living in France and Spain

• the lost generation of the post-World War I period believed that:– God did not exist– the universe is indifferent– the resulting world is hostile and muddled– without God and faith, moral values are also meaningless– the war is an example of this

Hemingway’s economical style

• Hemingway's economical writing style often seems simple and almost childlike, but his method is calculated and used to complex effect.

• provides detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely.

• avoids describing his characters' emotions and thoughts directly.

• provides the reader with the raw material of an experience and eliminates the authorial viewpoint– the reading of a text thus approximates the actual experience as

closely as possible

Hemingway’s ‘authentic’ style

• deeply concerned with authenticity in writing• a writer could treat a subject honestly only if the

writer had participated in or observed the subject closely. – without such knowledge the writer's work would be

flawed because the reader would sense the author's lack of expertise.

• an author writing about a familiar subject is able to write sparingly and eliminate a great deal of superfluous detail from the piece without sacrificing the voice of authority

Hemingway’s plain style

• the aim is precision• the plain style – expressing basic, yet deeply

felt, emotions – is set against the elaborate Victorian prose that dominated the previous era

The Sun Also Rises

Title inspiration

“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever… The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to the place where he arose…”

Ecclesiastes

narration

• 1st person point of view (limited)• Detached narrator• Regulation of info-flow• Uses of irony• Reliability?• Repetitions

setting

• Paris• bars• hotel rooms

characterization

• Jake Barnes - hero?/fool?• Brett Ashley - heroine?• Georgette – heroine/victim/fool?

thematics

• Jokes/words/talking• Wounds/war/rot• Books/writers/critics• Drinking/being "tight"/"blind"• Aficion/bull-fights/bulls/balls/steers• Fishing/fighting/sport• Bankruptcy/corruption/society

themes

• Love & sex or Emotion & decadence• Escape/search for meaning/being lost• Manly values and pursuits• Religion/ritual• Race

contexts

• Generationality• Expatriatism• Semiotics of topography• Intertextuality

elements of style

• sentence length• sentence syntax• diction• parts of speech• symbolism• dialogue• point of view• lexicon• detail • repetitions• narrator’s style vs speech patterns of characters

"How do you feel, Jake?" Brett asked. "My God! what a meal you've eaten.""I feel fine. Do you want a dessert?""Lord, no."Brett was smoking."You like to eat, don't you?" she said."Yes," I said. "I like to do a lot of things.""What do you like to do?""Oh," I said, "I like to do a lot of things. Don't you want a dessert?""You asked me that once," Brett said."Yes," I said. "So I did. Let's have another bottle of rioja alta.""It's very good.""You haven't drunk much of it," I said."I have. You haven't seen.”"Let's get two bottles," I said. The bottles came. I poured a little in my glass, then a glass for Brett, then filled my glass. We touched glasses."Bung-o!" Brett said. I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett put her hand on my arm."Don't get drunk, Jake," she said. "You don't have to.""How do you know?""Don't," she said. "You'll be all right.""I'm not getting drunk," I said. "I'm just drinking a little wine. I like to drink wine.""Don't get drunk," she said. "Jake, don't get drunk.

Modernist regionalists

• Edgar Lee Masters: Spoon River Anthology (1915)

• Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923)• William Carlos Williams, In the American

Grain, (1925)• William Faulkner develops the American

Gothic novel

regionalist concerns

• small town• meaningless marriages• accidents and diseases• individual ineptitude• economic exploitationPOETICS• the poet must return to himself• the word to vacancy• the symbol to disconnectedness• make home-made poetry