American Studies
Camelia Elias
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
• 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
Zelda
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)
anticipations
Letter 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 character
1. 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.” (5253)
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“
– 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
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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
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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
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Love & sex or Emotion & decadence
Escape/search for meaning/being lost
Manly values and pursuits
Religion/ritual
Race
contexts
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Generationality
Expatriatism
Semiotics of topography
Intertextuality
elements of style
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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 exploitation
POETICS
• the poet must return to himself
• the word to vacancy
• the symbol to disconnectedness
• make home-made poetry