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F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) PDF

191 Pages·2010·2.23 MB·English
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Preview F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Th e Adventures of Great Expectations One Flew over the Huckleberry Finn Th e Great Gatsby Cuckoo’s Nest Th e Age of Innocence Gulliver’s Travels One Hundred Years of Alice’s Adventures in Hamlet Solitude Wonderland Heart of Darkness Othello All Quiet on the Th e House on Mango Persuasion Western Front Street Portnoy’s Complaint Animal Farm I Know Why the Pride and Prejudice Th e Ballad of the Sad Caged Bird Sings Ragtime Café Th e Iliad Th e Red Badge of Beloved Invisible Man Courage Beowulf Romeo and Juliet Jane Eyre Black Boy Th e Rubáiyát of Omar Th e Joy Luck Club Th e Bluest Eye Khayyám Julius Caesar Th e Canterbury Tales Th e Scarlet Letter Th e Jungle Cat on a Hot Tin A Separate Peace King Lear Roof Silas Marner Long Day’s Journey Catch-22 Slaughterhouse-Five into Night Th e Catcher in the Song of Solomon Lord of the Flies Rye Th e Sound and the Th e Lord of the Rings Th e Chronicles of Fury Love in the Time of Narnia Th e Stranger Cholera Th e Color Purple A Streetcar Named Macbeth Crime and Desire Th e Man Without Punishment Sula Qualities Th e Crucible Th e Sun Also Rises Th e Merchant of Cry, the Beloved Th e Tale of Genji Venice Country A Tale of Two Cities Th e Metamorphosis Darkness at Noon “Th e Tell-Tale Heart” A Midsummer Night’s Death of a Salesman and Other Stories Dream Th e Death of Artemio Th eir Eyes Were Cruz Miss Lonelyhearts Watching God Th e Diary of Anne Moby-Dick Th ings Fall Apart Frank My Ántonia Th e Th ings Th ey Don Quixote Native Son Carried Emerson’s Essays Night To Kill a Mockingbird Emma 1984 Ulysses Fahrenheit 451 Th e Odyssey Waiting for Godot A Farewell to Arms Oedipus Rex Th e Waste Land Frankenstein Th e Old Man and the Wuthering Heights Th e Glass Menagerie Sea Young Goodman Th e Grapes of Wrath On the Road Brown Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Th e Great Gatsby New Edition Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: The Great Gatsby—New Edition Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The great Gatsby / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. — New ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical interpretations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-60413-820-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4381-3276-1 (e-book) 1. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (Francis Scott), 1896–1940. Great Gatsby. I. Bloom, Harold. PS3511.I9G83733 2010 813'.52—dc22 2009050922 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212)967-8800 or (800)322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing editor: Pamela Loos Cover design by Alicia Post Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book printed and bound by IBT Global, Troy NY Date printed: March 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Disembodied Voices and Narrating Bodies in The Great Gatsby 13 Barbara Hochman Deceitful Traces of Power: An Analysis of the Decadence of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby 39 Alberto Lena The Great Gatsby—The Text as Construct: Narrative Knots and Narrative Unfolding 59 Richard Lehan The Great Gatsby’s Aesthetics of Non-Identity 71 John Hilgart Pastoral Mode and Language in The Great Gatsby 97 Janet Giltrow and David Stouck “. . . and the long secret extravaganza was played out”: The Great Gatsby and Carnival in a Bakhtinian Perspective 109 Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua vi Contents The Great Gatsby and The Obscene Word 125 Barbara Will The American Carnival of The Great Gatsby 145 Philip McGowan The Trouble with Nick: Reading Gatsby Closely 157 Scott Donaldson Chronology 167 Contributors 169 Bibliography 171 Acknowledgments 175 Index 177 Editor’s Note My introduction centers on the book’s relation to the poetry of John Keats and so, in a sense, to Fitzgerald’s own “negative capability.” Barbara Hochman examines the ways reading and writing informed Fitzgerald’s composition of the novel, and Alberto Lena sees the decadent Tom Buchanan as the book’s embodiment of moral and cultural decline. Richard Lehan traces a few of the limitless meanings he detects within the work, while John Hilgart explores indeterminacy in the uncertainty and contradictions Fitzgerald introduces throughout. Janet Giltrow and David Stouck enter the pastoral mode, followed by Winifred Farrant Bevilacqua, who explores the novel’s bacchanalian sensibilities. For Barbara Will, language in Gatsby works against the demands of veracity, while Philip McGowan is the volume’s second author to take up the novel’s carnivalesque qualities. In the final essay, Scott Donaldson turns his attention to the slippery snob Nick Carraway. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction L 1 ionel Trilling justly observed of The Great Gatsby that “if the book grows in weight of significance with the years, we can be sure that this could not have happened had its form and style not been as right as they are.” Trilling, critically accurate, was also prophetic in regard to the novel’s augmenting importance. Indeed, that importance transcends The Great Gatsby’s formal achievement, its aesthetic dignity of shape and style. The book has become part of what must be called that American mythology, just as Fitzgerald himself now possesses mythological status, like Hemingway, or, in a dif- ferent sense, Norman Mailer. Myth is gossip grown old, according to the modern Polish aphorist Stanislaw Lec. Fitzgerald’s social aspirations, his mode of living, his marriage to Zelda, his “crack-up” and death at the age of forty-four: these now have aged into myth. But that is popular myth; The Great Gatsby is myth of another mode also, the mode of John Keats, whose spirit never departs from Fitzgerald’s best writing. Th e Great Gatsby is a lyrical novel, a triumph of sensibility, worthy of the poet who wrote Lamia, Th e Fall of Hyperion, the great Odes, and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” Consider a single scene in Gatsby, toward the end of chapter 5. Gatsby is showing Daisy (and Nick Carraway, the Conradian nar- rator) his house. Th ey enter his bedroom, where Daisy takes up a hairbrush of “pure dull gold” and smooths her hair, causing Gatsby, too happy in her happiness, to laugh too boisterously: “It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said hilariously. “I can’t— When I try to—” 1

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