Narratology 4

Question 1

The Great Gatsby

Answer 1

look at notes in folder

Question 2

What defines the Modernism?

Answer 2

• name of major artistic movement responding to the sense of social breakdown in the early 20th century
• marked by a cultural consciousness of newness, of vast changes in technology, society + science, and by the collective experience of crisis + expectation
• denotes an artistic + literary practice of realizing this consciousness by changing traditional forms of representation + finding new forms of representation and finding new forms of expression for the modernist sentiment in a modern literature
• many modernist works are structured by references to world mythology, which harbors a rich repertoire for patterns of searching + seeking
• Modernist writers often used references to literary, philosophical, religious contexts and details of the post to remind the reader of the lost, traditional coherence
• they also used chunks of popular culture, of “unliterary” materials

Question 3

Socio-historical background

Answer 3

• most powerful technological influence was the automobile
• 1920s: marked by the struggle between traditionalist Americans who wanted to define America according to a model of white, Protestant, small-town virtues + control the social behavior of others and new groups
• Prohibition
• 1920s also called Jazz Age; Flapper: innocent but liberated, modern young woman
• stock market crash in 1929
• Great Depression

Question 4

Images + Symbols in the Great Gatsby

Answer 4

(look at notes)

1) Ending:
- dark fields of republic: halfway between Dutch sailors + Gatsby’s time = allusion to the loss of the Jeffersonian dream of a rural America; represent darker sides of the westward movement + of a Jacksonian democracy marked by capitalism –> betrayal of the American Dream
- Dutch sailors signify more materialistic aspects of American history
- pandering: new continent was not a virgin land but as a “pandering” continent leads man to believe in dreams that can never be fulfilled
- Daisy’s voice often described as a whispering –> she also promises something that can never be gained

2) The American dream:
- F. balanced G. corruption against his incorruptible dream
- how u interpret F. nation of the dream depends largely on wether you see the ending as a nostalgic version of some last pristine dream as contrasted to a modern world of sterility + corruption or wether you see the original dream as faulty
- G. either failed bc. of his naive belief in a bygone dream which is unfit for modern wasteland or bc. the dream itself is a mere illusion
- was American dream betrayed by American history or was the dream laden with quilt from the start

Question 5

Three possibilities for reading the ending

Answer 5

1. it’s still possible to realize the dream, we just have to come to our senses + return to the values of the past
2. all hope for realizing the dream in our time is lost
3. the dream was always flawed + corrupted