Course Description

Instructor: Gautam Kundu

Praising The Great Gatsby in 1925, Gertrude Stein wrote to Fitzgerald saying that he was "creating the contemporary world much as Thackeray [sic] did in his Pendennis and Vanity Fair.” This course will focus, first, on Fitzgerald's creation of that “contemporary world” in The Great Gatsby, and then on its "contemporaneity."  The "contemporary world" of the novel is marked by signs of a new, expansive economy, of a remarkable number of things manufactured, marketed, and consumed during the early and mid-Twenties. Advertisements, billboards overlooking industrial wasteland, and luminous signs, these determine the core of the novel and provide its over-arching meanings. As for its "contemporaneity" a hundred years later, The Great Gatsby speaks to the "circularity of history," of a souring economy, and a fractious national mood shaped by a fear of cultural and ethnic dilution. But reading the novel a century later, it seems to be closer to our times, and fresh, because, despite its wistful tone of loss and its general sense of ennui and disenchantment, The Great Gatsby strikes a nuanced balance of moral and cultural critique, and hope.

Book: F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and his two short stories, "Winter Dreams" and "Absolution,"both of which are often read as "precursor" stories related to Gatsby.

Bio: I am a retired Professor of English, having taught at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, since the early nineties. My terminal degree (from Oklahoma State) is in modern American literature and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I have authored a book on Fitzgerald and Film, and a second one on Willa Cather and Fitzgerald, both published in the US.