Download The Great Gatsby

F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
and The Roaring Twenties
The Roaring Twenties
The decade of the twenties is often referred to as the “
Jazz Age’. However, the term has much as much to do
with the jazzy atmosphere of the time as with the
music.
Jazz
• Prohibition brought many
jazz musicians north from
New Orleans to Chicago
and New York.
• Jazz became the
soundtrack of rebellion for
a younger generation
Jazz Style & Fashion
• Flappers were typical young girls of the twenties, usually with
bobbed hair, short skirts, rolled stockings, and powdered knees.
• They danced the night away doing the Charleston and the
Black Bottom.
Jazzy Talk -Twenties Slang
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All Wet - wrong
Bee’s Knees - a superb person
Big Cheese -an important person
Bump Off - to murder
Dumb Dora - a stupid girl
Flat Tire - a dull, boring person
Gam - a girls leg
Hooch - bootleg liquor
Hoofer - chorus girl
Torpedo - a hired gunman
Symphonic Jazz and Gatsby
• George Gershwin wrote both
classical and popular music
• He was the first composer to
combine jazz and classical music
with Rhapsody in Blue in1924
• Was this Vladimir Tostoff’s “Jazz
History of the World”?
Lifestyles and fashions of the 1920s
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No more Victorian Values
Flappers
Collegiate Students
Independent women
Gaiety
Increasing wealth
Social mobility
Alcohol consumption
Prohibition
• The Volstead Act
• 18th Amendment
(1919)
• Bootleggers
– Sold, bought,
consumed alcohol.
– Gangsters and
organized crime
Media and Technology
• The Automobile
– the car is available to many
• Mass Media
– Magazines and literacy
• Reader’s Digest
• Time
– Radios and advertising
– New forms of narrative
• Movie - “talkies” e.g. The Jazz
Singer
F Scott Fitzgerald
• From prominent American stock
• Attended Princeton but left without
graduating
• Missed WWI
• Met Zelda but couldn’t afford to marry her
• Published This Side of Paradise in 1920 at
the age of 24: instant stardom
• Wrote “money-making” popular fiction for
most of his life, mainly for the New York
Post: $4000 a story (which equates to
about $50,000 today)
• He and Zelda were associated with high
living of the Jazz Age
Fitzgerald cont’d
• Wrote what is considered his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby,
in Europe in 1924-25
• Zelda becomes mentally unstable
• Moved to Hollywood as a screen writer
• Dies almost forgotten aged 45
• Zelda perished in a mental hospital fire in 1948
• Only became a “literary great” in the 1960s
Literature of the 1920s
• Authors wrote about their
personal lives as something
“knowable”.
• Gatsby contains a great deal
of autobiographical material
and references to the 1920s.
• Fitzgerald was also influenced
by Modernist theories about
art.
Activity
Create a twenty line dialogue using fifteen terms
from the 1920s slang dictionary. You may use up to
three characters.
Now you’re on the trolley!
The Modernist Era
• Rejection of Romanticism and the advent of moral
uncertainty
– the catastrophe of World War I
– (the wasteland and valley of ashes)
• Embracing the new i.e. mechanization and industrialization
– (Gatsby’s car)
– new (replaceable) fashions
– mass entertainment
• Using new means of Representation
– the development of cinema,
– the mass media and advertising
Modernism and Nick Carraway
• Because of the chaos there was a longing
for order.
• The modernist generation produced
utopian ideologies such as communism,
fascism, and futurism.
• Look at Nick in his retreat from the
modern word.
• “I wanted the world to be in uniform and
to stand to a sort of moral attention
forever”
Modernism and Romanticism
Nick
Gatsby
Fitzgerald and Modernism
• Modernists mistrusted the possibility of absolute truth
and idealism.
• Consider the multiple and limited points-of-view
employed in Gatsby. What effect does this have on the
concept of absolute truth?
• How does Nick force us to view the “reality” that he
portrays?
• In modernist literature “loose ends” were embraced
rather resolved clearly. What does this suggest about the
truth?
• Does Fitzgerald do this with The Great Gatsby?