Is The “Great Gatbsy” himself really that “Great?”
The Great Gatsby is a classic book that has often been described as the classic, Modern-American Novel, while I am not attempting to question that appropriation, I do want to question Gatsby’s “Greatness?”
The narrator of the novel is Nick Carraway, another Midwesterner and veteran, and a 1915 Yale graduate, who by chance has rented the next to Gatsby’s as he tries his hand at the New York Bond business. On the first page of the book Nick says that he’s inclined to reserve all judgments of people, but on the second page he notes that Gatsby represented everything for which he has an unaffected scorn. Later Nick says that he disapproved of Gatsby from beginning to end. In fact, we learn during the book that Gatsby has lied more than once, that he has apparently accumulated his wealth not only immorally but illegally, and that he’s willing to sacrifice anything for his infatuation with a married woman. So again, what’s so great about Gatsby?
Well, Nick also tells us that Gatsby had “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”(2) Nick explains that “The truth was that Jay Gatsby. Sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God..and he must be about his father’s business”(99). He was an idealist who lived with” a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.”(100)
Gatsby’s idealism is closely related to the American Dream: If only one works hard, just the way Benjamin Franklin told us to, and Gatsby had developed his own list of resolutions as a boy; one would become healthy, wealthy and wise. His father said after Gatsby was found murdered in his own swimming pool: “He had a big future before him, you know.. If he’d of lived, he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill, He’d of helped build up the country.”(169)
Yet Gatsby’s idealism, once he met Daisy, became attached solely to her. After he made love to her while he was in the army, “he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.”(149) As Nick learned later, Gatsby “knew Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a ‘nice’ girl could be.” Although penniless, he had let her believe that he was from much the same social stratum as herself, and she came to represent everything that he wanted his life to be. As Fitzgerald writes, “Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes, and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.”(150)
One leaves this book feeling that Gatsby is indeed great—certainly in comparison to those who surround him in Fitzgerald’s novel. Yet he is also tragically flawed by impoverished dreams and by limited ideals. On the last page of the book Nick says, “I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come along way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind..”(182)
Works Cited
The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
We Want Moore
Marianne Moore was a modernist or some would argue a post-modernist, American poet and writer, known particularly for her irony, and wit. Her poetry expresses her moral strength and artistic mastery, and can be studied at different levels of complexity. She uses paradoxes, and nature imagery to force two dominating forces in ambiguous way to make a point, which is exemplified in her poem titled “Poetry.”
The poem begins with its speaker making a rather ironic comment about her distaste for poetry, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all, this fiddle.”(Moore 438) This comment is contradictory, because while she does not prefer poetry, the speaker nonetheless expresses herself through the medium of a poem. It becomes briefly clear with the use of the word “fiddle.” Apparently, the speaker believes that poetry can be trifling, or that poetry-writing process involves too much petty tampering. The speaker’s conversational opening of the poem allows for a tone that seems casual, yet it one that is marked by witty intelligence.
Lines 2-3 contains a statement that argues with the one in lines one and two. Here Moore admits that although one might think oneself perfectly despising poetry or poetry-writing process “ Reading it however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine”(Moore 438) To Moore, “the genuine” represents the most essential attribute of good art. She is a difficult poet, but not obscure one; on the contrary she is very clear, but my difficulty at times is her insistence that we think and think well at every point. Similar to William Carlos Williams she shoots what is beautiful in itself and not part of the whole. For both artists imagination is placed in opposition to intellection. The raw material for poetry abounds, it is everywhere, is anything, but it must be imaginatively grasped.
As Elizabeth Joyce refers to “Imagination proceeds from a deeper source than intellection. When in “Melanchthon,” Miss Moore speaks of the “beautiful element of unreason” underlying the poet’s tough hide, I think she is talking about the place where imagination grows. The element is “genuine” because it cannot be otherwise, its source mysterious, hidden under layers of the rational mind. Poetry then when it is genuine, is a collision of this private vision with the outside world. It is an imaginary garden full of real toads.” (Joyce 1)
“Poetry” makes the case for attribution of authority to traditionally “secondary” texts in its insistence that “business documents and schoolbooks” may be poetry. “Throughout Moore’s work her many quotations from secondary sources- precisely the realm of “business documents and school-books” argue for the value of such sources by claiming her work’s dependence on them for its (redefined) authority.” (Gregory 4)Marianne Moore is a very distinctive poet from many of her time, yet there is still an ever going debate about whether to label her a modernist or post-modernist and yet I still don’t have an answer. She embodies and utilizes both forms of art.
Works Cited
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Blackmur, R. P. 'The Method of Marianne Moore." The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidatio. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935.
Bogan, Louise. "American Timeless." Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (1948): 151.
Braithwaite Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modem World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.
The poem begins with its speaker making a rather ironic comment about her distaste for poetry, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all, this fiddle.”(Moore 438) This comment is contradictory, because while she does not prefer poetry, the speaker nonetheless expresses herself through the medium of a poem. It becomes briefly clear with the use of the word “fiddle.” Apparently, the speaker believes that poetry can be trifling, or that poetry-writing process involves too much petty tampering. The speaker’s conversational opening of the poem allows for a tone that seems casual, yet it one that is marked by witty intelligence.
Lines 2-3 contains a statement that argues with the one in lines one and two. Here Moore admits that although one might think oneself perfectly despising poetry or poetry-writing process “ Reading it however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine”(Moore 438) To Moore, “the genuine” represents the most essential attribute of good art. She is a difficult poet, but not obscure one; on the contrary she is very clear, but my difficulty at times is her insistence that we think and think well at every point. Similar to William Carlos Williams she shoots what is beautiful in itself and not part of the whole. For both artists imagination is placed in opposition to intellection. The raw material for poetry abounds, it is everywhere, is anything, but it must be imaginatively grasped.
As Elizabeth Joyce refers to “Imagination proceeds from a deeper source than intellection. When in “Melanchthon,” Miss Moore speaks of the “beautiful element of unreason” underlying the poet’s tough hide, I think she is talking about the place where imagination grows. The element is “genuine” because it cannot be otherwise, its source mysterious, hidden under layers of the rational mind. Poetry then when it is genuine, is a collision of this private vision with the outside world. It is an imaginary garden full of real toads.” (Joyce 1)
“Poetry” makes the case for attribution of authority to traditionally “secondary” texts in its insistence that “business documents and schoolbooks” may be poetry. “Throughout Moore’s work her many quotations from secondary sources- precisely the realm of “business documents and school-books” argue for the value of such sources by claiming her work’s dependence on them for its (redefined) authority.” (Gregory 4)Marianne Moore is a very distinctive poet from many of her time, yet there is still an ever going debate about whether to label her a modernist or post-modernist and yet I still don’t have an answer. She embodies and utilizes both forms of art.
Works Cited
Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Blackmur, R. P. 'The Method of Marianne Moore." The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidatio. New York: Arrow Editions, 1935.
Bogan, Louise. "American Timeless." Quarterly Review of Literature 4 (1948): 151.
Braithwaite Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Costello, Bonnie. Marianne Moore: Imaginary Possessions. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.
Daiches, David. The Novel and the Modem World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
McKay's Way
It has been argued that the Harlem Renaissance, or the New Negro Movement, is the defining moment in African American literature because of an unprecedented outburst of creative activity among black writers. The importance of this movement to African American literary art lies in the efforts of its writers to exalt the heritage of African Americans and to use their unique culture as a means toward re-defining African American literary expression.
The sudden blossoming of literature called the Negro Renaissance gave a voice to Negroes in the twenties. The Negro Renaissance became part of a general revolt by the writers of the decade against the gross materialism and outmoded moral values of America’s new industrial society. Negro writer’s found strength in their own folk culture. Claude Mckay was one of the first to express the spirit of the New Negro.
Claude McKay (1890-1948)-, named Fetus Claudius after a Biblical Roman Emperor, was born the youngest of eleven children in Jamaica, then a British Colony in the West Indies. His mother’s family was originally slaves in Madagascar; his father had Ashanti ancestors. Grounded in black peasant culture within a color-conscious society, the ambitious dark-skinned Mckay’s belonged to an educated economic minority. Although later he severed most ties with his family, Claude Mckay’s earliest years were pleasant one’s, a “time when…Imagination itself awoke” for him(11). Even as child, in literature he found, “broad new worlds romance and thought” (14). Reading widely amongst the English and continental poets and philosophers, McKay developed the “highly intuitive capabilities of a poet” (20).
McKay spent a brief time in the Jamaican constabulary in 1911, but his heart was elsewhere. In 1912, he published two poems of dialectic poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. These books represent the first attempt by a West Indian educated in the British imperial tradition as using local dialect as poetic medium. McKay’s career as a social rebel began with his social commentary that appeared on the pages of island newspapers. But in 1912, McKay came to America and never returned to Jamaica.
Like many other Negro writers of the twenties most notably, Langston Hughes, Mckay shared to a degree, the same feeling of alienation that characterized Gertrude Stein or Hemmingway’s “lost generation”. In 1918, McKay could’ve wrote “And now this great catastrophe [World War I] has come upon the worlds proving real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride, one of the many things one was taught to respect and revere.”(Cooper 5) Particularly, One of the six poems now famous “If We Must Die”. It’s a very tension-filled strategic, and paradoxical poem. It was a desperate shout of defiance “While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs/ Making their mock at our accursed lot”(501 Line4-5) almost, seemed tragic and hopeless, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ hunted and pinned in an inglorious spot.” At the same time, it proclaimed that in Negroes the spirit of human courage remained fully alive, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/ pressed to the wall, dying but fighting pack.”(502 Line14-15)
Works Cited
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, pg-501-502
Claude McKay and the New Negro of the 1920's Author(s): Wayne Cooper Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 25, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1964), pp. 297-306
The sudden blossoming of literature called the Negro Renaissance gave a voice to Negroes in the twenties. The Negro Renaissance became part of a general revolt by the writers of the decade against the gross materialism and outmoded moral values of America’s new industrial society. Negro writer’s found strength in their own folk culture. Claude Mckay was one of the first to express the spirit of the New Negro.
Claude McKay (1890-1948)-, named Fetus Claudius after a Biblical Roman Emperor, was born the youngest of eleven children in Jamaica, then a British Colony in the West Indies. His mother’s family was originally slaves in Madagascar; his father had Ashanti ancestors. Grounded in black peasant culture within a color-conscious society, the ambitious dark-skinned Mckay’s belonged to an educated economic minority. Although later he severed most ties with his family, Claude Mckay’s earliest years were pleasant one’s, a “time when…Imagination itself awoke” for him(11). Even as child, in literature he found, “broad new worlds romance and thought” (14). Reading widely amongst the English and continental poets and philosophers, McKay developed the “highly intuitive capabilities of a poet” (20).
McKay spent a brief time in the Jamaican constabulary in 1911, but his heart was elsewhere. In 1912, he published two poems of dialectic poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. These books represent the first attempt by a West Indian educated in the British imperial tradition as using local dialect as poetic medium. McKay’s career as a social rebel began with his social commentary that appeared on the pages of island newspapers. But in 1912, McKay came to America and never returned to Jamaica.
Like many other Negro writers of the twenties most notably, Langston Hughes, Mckay shared to a degree, the same feeling of alienation that characterized Gertrude Stein or Hemmingway’s “lost generation”. In 1918, McKay could’ve wrote “And now this great catastrophe [World War I] has come upon the worlds proving real hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride, one of the many things one was taught to respect and revere.”(Cooper 5) Particularly, One of the six poems now famous “If We Must Die”. It’s a very tension-filled strategic, and paradoxical poem. It was a desperate shout of defiance “While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs/ Making their mock at our accursed lot”(501 Line4-5) almost, seemed tragic and hopeless, “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/ hunted and pinned in an inglorious spot.” At the same time, it proclaimed that in Negroes the spirit of human courage remained fully alive, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack/ pressed to the wall, dying but fighting pack.”(502 Line14-15)
Works Cited
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, pg-501-502
Claude McKay and the New Negro of the 1920's Author(s): Wayne Cooper Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 25, No. 3 (3rd Qtr., 1964), pp. 297-306
"Stein's Mind"
Gertrude Stine was quoted saying, “In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something. And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name” (242).
She has explored the fact that peoples, places or things, also know as nouns, have been give a name derived usually from a series of letters that combine to form a word. One could say, all words are groupings of meaningless letters combined to form meaning. However the sum of its parts do not convey meaning they convey a sound and this sound then in turn is attached to an object. Stine believes, nouns lack meaning, as they are merely labels, a novelty. This novelty makes it easier to register in our brain as something particular. Although for sight and material value the word doesn’t describe truly what it is nor what it does. Nouns seem to be purely adapted for retention rather than description. They lack emotion and material context therefore are not suited for poetry especially poetry that is suppose to captivate the mind and make you feel. Also I feel as if Stine feels language, particularly nouns, have been created by white male supremacist and that the refusal of using them creates a further disconnect from the male oppressor. In examining “Rooms” she takes a much more personal language experience than either “Objects” or “Food”. Rather than simply assuming male ubiquity and omnipotence, Stein specifically antagonizes a male presence, oblivious to male objectification and alleged male needs, which she wants no part of. Steins argument, that nouns have lost their power to accurately convey meaning, without also limiting its significance by excluding other meanings. Stein’s exclusionary theory of language, then, was her motivation for an exploration of literary cubism. Like the visual artists who rejected the possibility of a single objective representation, Stein’s poetry is a response to power dynamics behind systematic labels. More specifically,
Tender Buttons reclaims meaning from patriarchal and exclusionary traditions. Within the poems, she often writes of women; specifically she mentions names like “Pauline” and “Mildred” and generally she uses “ladies,” “little women,” and “sister.” Many assert that even Stein’s words refer to women by using “-er” as a pun on “her” especially in nouns created from verbs like “hunter” so that the action is redirected (hunt her). This redirection is another example of the ways Stein challenges noun usage.
Gertrude Stein literary experimentation turns English into “a foreign language of her own”(Mellow 64). Tender Buttons remains impermeable to any interpretive operation aimed at an thematic synthesis.( Mellow64)
Works Cited
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons" Author(s): Mena Mitrano Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 87-102
She has explored the fact that peoples, places or things, also know as nouns, have been give a name derived usually from a series of letters that combine to form a word. One could say, all words are groupings of meaningless letters combined to form meaning. However the sum of its parts do not convey meaning they convey a sound and this sound then in turn is attached to an object. Stine believes, nouns lack meaning, as they are merely labels, a novelty. This novelty makes it easier to register in our brain as something particular. Although for sight and material value the word doesn’t describe truly what it is nor what it does. Nouns seem to be purely adapted for retention rather than description. They lack emotion and material context therefore are not suited for poetry especially poetry that is suppose to captivate the mind and make you feel. Also I feel as if Stine feels language, particularly nouns, have been created by white male supremacist and that the refusal of using them creates a further disconnect from the male oppressor. In examining “Rooms” she takes a much more personal language experience than either “Objects” or “Food”. Rather than simply assuming male ubiquity and omnipotence, Stein specifically antagonizes a male presence, oblivious to male objectification and alleged male needs, which she wants no part of. Steins argument, that nouns have lost their power to accurately convey meaning, without also limiting its significance by excluding other meanings. Stein’s exclusionary theory of language, then, was her motivation for an exploration of literary cubism. Like the visual artists who rejected the possibility of a single objective representation, Stein’s poetry is a response to power dynamics behind systematic labels. More specifically,
Tender Buttons reclaims meaning from patriarchal and exclusionary traditions. Within the poems, she often writes of women; specifically she mentions names like “Pauline” and “Mildred” and generally she uses “ladies,” “little women,” and “sister.” Many assert that even Stein’s words refer to women by using “-er” as a pun on “her” especially in nouns created from verbs like “hunter” so that the action is redirected (hunt her). This redirection is another example of the ways Stein challenges noun usage.
Gertrude Stein literary experimentation turns English into “a foreign language of her own”(Mellow 64). Tender Buttons remains impermeable to any interpretive operation aimed at an thematic synthesis.( Mellow64)
Works Cited
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
Linguistic Exoticism and Literary Alienation: Gertrude Stein's "Tender Buttons" Author(s): Mena Mitrano Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 87-102
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