F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby and 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. The Roaring Twenties

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 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 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 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?