American Modernism

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMxX-QOV9tI American Modernism The Great Gatsby (1926)

2. America is the oldest country in the world (Gertrude Stein) • “Because by the methods of the civil war and the commercial conceptions that followed it America created the twentieth century” (78). • US in the 1920s. ‘The Jazz Age.’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WRSpCNSm54 • World War 1 not as a ‘Wasteland’ but as confirmation of the US as world superpower • Optimism, Energy, Wealth • Technological Advancement, transport • Innovations in labour • Power of Wall Street • Entertainment industry—cinema, music, theatre • Gender questions: of manhood, sexuality, women’s freedom, nature of work, flappers, men of business, sports heroes, farming to industry.

3. The Great Gatsby • Gatsby ‘is America’: “Gatsby, between power and dreams, comes inevitably to stand for America itself” (in Lionel Trilling's introduction to The Great Gatsby, N.Y. New Directions, 1945) • The Ultimate Self-Made Man—’the Platonic conception of himself’ • Past is no restriction, creation in the moment and a life in the present. The past is never the same; history of the present; there is no such thing as repetition, repetition (Rose is a rose is a rose—Gertrude Stein) • Myth-making, shaping of narrative, the ‘exceptional’ as the ‘normative’ • ‘American Dream’—the idea of ‘the green light.’ • Man of Action, Monomania—the 1920s version of Moby-Dick’s Ahab. War Hero, in Uniform. ‘Killed’ a man, fixing world series, bootlegging, stealing of bonds (or counterfeit). Stories, myths. Daisy as Gatsby’s quest. • West v East.

4. I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known (66) • The Telling of the Tale—this ‘myth’ of America—The Founding Blocks of Modern America. • Book as Nick’s ‘Memoir’ of a summer in New York • Question of Reliability—another focus of ‘Gatsby Criticism’ • Duality of the participant/observer narrative structure. • Nick of innocence during the events; Nick of experience—the narrator/writer. • Moments of ‘metatextuality’ where he points to the actual writing and narrative construction. • Most discussed: moment of telling Gatsby’s ‘real’ life in his memoir occurs at a different moment (after the seduction of Daisy and at the time of the newspaper reporter) than during the events (at the pool) The Biggest Crowd

5. You resemble the advertisement of a man (125) • ‘The Men Who Built America’ (PBS series) • Tycoons, Robber Barrons, The Capitalists. • Vast Wealth, ‘Richest Man of America’; flaunting of Wealth. • Legacy Building during life-time. Philanthropy, Building Monuments • On the edge of legislation, democracy. ‘Survival of the Fittest’ • Americanization Projects • Mythical Self-Made Narratives • What’s at Stake? Past, Present, Control: Narrative Key; the advertisement is key—presentation itself.

6. John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937); US Standard Oil; ‘Royal Family’ • Poverty, father conman and bigamist (Devil Bill), Cleveland, Ohio, Baptist Mother, high school drop out • Oil Refineries • The Face of Monopoly (controlling the refineries, transport/rail, building of pipes, investing in new technology, buying out); communicate in Code; lowering costs • Trust—avoiding legislation—Trust as the Corporation of Corporations • ‘Most hated man in America’; ‘individualism has gone’ • Ludlow Massacre of 1914 (Miners strike in Colorado) • Newspaper exposures of business practices; Ida Tarbell • Gilded Age Wedding, 1901 Rhode Island. Son Jr to Abby Green Aldrich (daughter of US Senator). • Retires in mid-50s; lovable old man image • Rockefeller Center (built after crash); Museum of Modern Art; buying land in Wyoming; Spellman College • Philanthropy as ‘Shaping of America’

7. Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919): Steel • Scottish Immigrant (12); Dunfermline; father weaver squeezed out by industrial revolution; mother ambitious. Father/grandfather fiercely anti-aristocratic. No education. • Base: Pittsburgh. Boiler heater; telegraph boy; railroad, to steel. • Technology, progress, and capitalism (Herbert Spencer, ‘Survival of the Fittest’) • Reduction of Cost; Competition between factories • Breaking of Unions (but had others do his dirty work while he wrote tracts on the rights of workers to unionize, Henry Clay Frick). Homestead Strike 1892, Pinkerton Security Force. • Steel for Brooklyn Bridge • Sells company at 65 to JP Morgan for 430million. Now ‘richest man in America.’ • Buys Pittencrieff Park (1902) in Scotland and gifts it to the public • Carnegie Libraries, Art.—Philanthropy as Business.

8. (J.P.) John Pierpoint Morgan (1837-1913); Banking • Father banker; educated in Germany, Boston; wealth; substitute in Civil War • Deals Railroad (Vanderbilt); Steel (Carnegie) • Gold Standard Crisis (1895); power over government • Wealth (yacht Corsair) • Deals—bringing business together (locking them in rooms) • Fights with Theodore Roosevelt • Money=Character • Wall Street as Financial Superpower (crashes and wealth) • Selling Bonds to the Public • Art Collection from Europe; ‘world’s great art collector’ • Famous Extravagant Parties

9. Henry Ford (1863-1947): The Affordable Car • Son of Farmer, Michigan (father Irish immigrant; mother Belgian); engineer-tinkerer; drop out of education to go to work. From Edison to own company. First one failed, then racing driver and got new investors after winning. • Detroit. • Machine v Craftsmen. Assembly line innovation. Increases Productive. • Ford Model T. 1,000 a day. ‘The Perfect Model’ Opens up American transport, farmers, small town out of isolation. • Americanization Immigrants and surveillance of workers • Welfare Capitalism: 5-dollar-a-day wage (to combat high turnover), 1914 • Despises Investors, big bankers • Fervent Anti-Semite (Dearborn Independent)—Hitler medal and Volkswagen modeled on Ford T • Cinema Company—controlling his own image. • Does not understand consumerism—a new model every year; General Motors overtakes him. • Home: Fair lane, Dearborn Michigan.

10. William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951): Media, Newpapers • Father owns mines; educated at Yale; father gives him San Francisco Examiner; • Golden Age of Newspapers • Yellow Journalism; huge fonts; entertainment; calling for someone to shoot president McKinley (and it happens). • Battle of Newspapers in New York with Pulitzer • Cuban-American War: ‘you supply the pictures; I supply the war’ • San Simeon Castle. Parties; Secret Elevator; Art; Zoo; • Living with mistress Marion Davies (newspaper gives great reviews of her movies). • ‘Battle of Citizen Cane’

11. Mr Nobody from Nowhere (136):Money and Value • Does it matter where the money comes from? • “Old” (Buchanans) v “New” (Gatsby)—East Egg v West Egg. Money: The Rich • Buchanan--Inherited. What is the family ‘business’? Chicago • Faye—Inherited. Louisville. Slavery Plantation? Southern Belle • Carraway—Inherited. Father Hardware Business’ wealth—’substitute in Civil War’; supports Nick for a year to explore the ‘Bond’ business’; Probity Trust • Gatsby—”work”. Wolfsheim’s ‘gonnegction’; North Dakota. Lake Superior; Cody; cheated out of inheritance. “I made this in three years.” (bootlegging in drugstores). Promoted to Major in army. • Dan Cody—Nevada Silver of Yukon; transaction Montana Copper. Many times a millionaire; Ella Kaye-mistress and newspaper woman. • Wolfsheim—conman/mobster. Gambling, bond counterfeits. Immigrant • Jordan Baker—Louisville. Aunt lives in NY. Unclear status. • George Wilson—work, garage, valley of ashes • Money from the Past or the Present—American Civilization • Tom Buchanan and the Past and ‘Idea of America’; Race theory; Only one to have remodeled a garage into stables; bringing over Polo ponies; visiting Gatsby on horseback. Football hero at Yale—life climax at 21; now: ‘the polo player.’ • Gatsby conquering the past and remaking it. ‘You can’t change the past; of course you can’. • Money as Success and Consumer Culture. How to measure: • Consumables: Houses, Cars, Libraries, Shirts, Pools, Parties, Airplane. Constant competition over flaunting of wealth. Hotels as ultimate consumable location.

12. Value, Trust, and Bond • Constant battle over representation of values: what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’: • Is Nick a trustworthy moral compass? • What does he actually ‘do’ at Probity Trust? What is a ‘bond’; what is a ‘trust’? Buying trust? Obligation for interest on the bond or believing in the value of a ‘trust.’ • He went into the bond business because it had ‘supported countless other men.’—again, idea of ‘the substitute’ • Escapes home from a close ‘girl’ friend. Is he married now, as he writes his memoir? • Nick cannot seem to trust and bond with women: Jordan Baker (story of cheating?), relationship with woman in New Jersey, stalks girls in NY; doesn’t keep promises to Daisy. • American family life and sexuality. ‘Women running around.’ Daisy as mother. Tom, affairs, and violence (Santa Barbara, Chicago, Myrtle); Daisy affair with Gatsby (and many premarital affairs); Gatsby and Daisy—his affairs; Cody and mistress; Nick and Jordan. Parties as orgies. Strange episode MrMrs McKee. • Above the law: No one tells the truth to the police. Catherine questioned, but so is Nick.

13. Bad Driver • You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I (185) • Driving metaphor as indication of moral character. • The narrative is filled with car accidents, comical, fatal, tragic. • Narrative itself stop/start with gaps, misreadings, mistakes in quite a few places. • Road Narrative (drifting) v Linear Narrative (Self-made man narrative)—’Crash’ • Revealing ‘the truth’: Investigation Tom B into Gatsby ; Newspaper reporter; Gatsby’s father—reveals Gatsby bought him a house—Wolfsheim ‘I made him.’ • ‘Science’ of Tom B—Jordan, ’we’re all white here’

14. God sees everything • ‘God sees everything, repeated Wilson. ‘That’s an advertisement,’ Michaelis assured him. (166) • The Valley of the Ashes, the landfill between Long Island (EastEgg/WestEgg) and New York becomes the back drop for the most famous car accident in literature. A dual road and commuter rail line. • Wilson is Gatsby’s executioner, all based on a misreading of who’s driving.

15. America is the oldest country in the world • Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic 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 further…And one fine morning— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (188) • American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. (Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893)

16. Approaches to Text • “American Dream” classic revised dramatically • As text central in decolonizing the curriculum—Is the era of “Make America Great Again.” Race, Colonialism, Expansion, class, gender. • Readings of: • Passing Narratives—racial passing, class passing (Nella Larsen, Schuyler, Fauset): • PEKAROFSKI, MICHAEL. “The Passing of Jay Gatsby: Class and Anti-Semitism in Fitzgerald's 1920s America.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 10, 2012, pp. 52–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41693878. • (Gatsby and Passing)

17. Immigration Narrative and Race • Attitudes towards immigration in the 1920s and how the text enacts those. • Vogel, Joseph. “‘Civilization's Going to Pieces’: The Great Gatsby, Identity, and Race, From the Jazz Age to the Obama Era.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 29–54. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/fscotfitzrevi.13.1.0029. • (Gatsby and Race) • Meehan, Adam. “Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2014, pp. 76–91. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.37.2.76. • (Another Race one)

18. Technological Advancement • Technological Advancement, transport, morality, (Adams’: the new forces of anarchical”), power and force. • (Gatsby and Cars) • Little, M. (2015). "I could make some money": Cars and currency in the great gatsby. Papers on Language and Literature, 51(1), 3-26,100. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/docview/1675223238?accountid=13828

19. Wilderness Theory. Horses and dogs in Gatsby • Derrida and Animal • Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369–418. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1344276. • Derrida on youtube: • On youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry49Jr0TFjk • In Gatsby, the Airedale pub (‘no police dog’): Myrtle and Tom’s dog for the apartment. 33-34

20. Capital and corruption exemplified through sports • Baseball World Series Fix • https://www-jstor-org.sheffield.idm.oclc.org/stable/41583031?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents • (Gatsby and Baseball) • Jordan and golf? Cheating?

21. Queer Theory • Between Men? • Froehlich, M. G. (2011). Gatsby’s Mentors: Queer Relations between Love and Money in the Great Gatsby. The Journal of Men’s Studies, 19(3), 209–226. https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.1903.209 • Moments in the text: • Also depiction Nick (running away from engagement; Jordan’s kiss; flapper, photographer scene)