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This chapter turns to the 20th century and weighs the response of three canonical novels to the new popularity of ocularcentrism. The texts are Wharton’s Summer, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, all classics of early modernism. The three books, like their 19th-century precursors, flirt with linguistic and optical revelation. But in the end, they too renounce the imperial claims of the new technologies of visibility.

This chapter describes two different ways in which Fitzgerald's fiction absorbs the influence of photography and film. On one level, particularly evident in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald delights in reproducing the “flicker” of film, the disorienting modernity of it. On another level, though, he clearly fears the retrograde repetitiousness of all recording media, which appears in Tender Is the Night as an experiential and narrative “rewind.” In both its positive and its negative senses, film pivots on the image of the black body, which appears in these novels either as a liberating or a particularly enigmatic object of sight.

This chapter lays out the book's argument and is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the literary-historical thesis that American modernist fiction by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner reflects — in its plot and characters, the history of the mostly meritocratic mobilization for World War I. At the heart of the three 1920s novels by these authors are “love triangles” involving Anglo-male characters bested in love and war and thus compromised in their masculinity; desirable and promiscuous Anglo females whom the Anglo males cannot have; and ethnic or outsider upstart competitors (of the Anglos) who have ties to the military and get the Anglo girls. The second part of the chapter discusses the history of the mobilization, which is today partly forgotten, and it argues with “received ideas” about modernism and the wartime era that are mistaken or misleading. Specifically, it addresses received ideas about intelligence testing during the war and, more generally, treatment of immigrants and ethnic Americans in the period; it also discusses the military's treatment of blacks. The third part addresses the relevant personal histories of these authors: Fitzgerald was denied promotions he expected and never saw action; Hemingway and Faulkner were disqualified from service on physical grounds.

This chapter first looks at the novel as the epic, noting differences between the two concepts such as: the novel fundamentally “shows” a story rather than “tells” it. Unlike the literature of the past, the novel also is not dependent upon a well-known story such as those found in myth, legend, or the Bible. Although allusions to them surface, the main purpose and reality of the novel is what the five senses disclose about reality. This chapter looks at two novels that illustrate various aspects about the novel, and how these particular novels explore the concepts behind John Locke's theory of knowledge. It studies Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

This chapter juxtaposes the tales of two ambitious men, both born in the American West, who moved east to New York in an effort to make names for themselves during the 1920s. The ambitions of Jay Gatsby—as recounted in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—and William O. Douglas—as recounted in his autobiography, Go East, Young Man—led the two men in very different directions. Where Gatsby turned to lawlessness, Douglas instead turned to law. The distinct journeys and distinct fates that Gatsby and Douglas experience yield insight into the significance of class within the United States, and also offer significant complications of the American Dream.

The first party sequence in Baz Luhrmann’ s The Great Gatsby (2013) counts as one of the most opulent, densely articulated, and extravagant in film history. On its release critics noted its ‘frenetic beauty’, ‘orgasmic pitch’, and ‘Vincente Minnelli-style suavity with controlled vertigo’. Décor, costuming, sound, movement, and colour come to the fore because the sequence’s spatial layout can’t be determined until its end. The mélanged soundtrack itself refuses to grant the viewer a sense of ground. What distances might this musical sample brook? Who’s performing and who isn’t? To which period and community does this music speak? Why this snippet against that? Sounds’ sources and imagined spatial locations seem to cross and overlap with elaborate vectors. This analysis plumbs the ways nineteen aural and visual techniques pull the viewer affectively and proprioceptively in different directions, helping, with the aid of digital technologies, to construct an extravagant rhetoric appropriate for our unfortunate gilded age. Considering Gatsby provides a way to further understand audiovisual aesthetics, the newly emergent role of soundtracks, contemporary cinema, and our time.

This chapter overviews how Fitzgerald’s war writing was refracted through his evolution as a writer, from The Side of Paradise—his chaotic and immature debut novel—through his experimentations with naturalism in The Beautiful and Damned, to the ambiguous portrayal he gives of World War I in The Great Gatsby. Tender Is the Night, while more stylistically mature than Fitzgerald’s first novel, I argue, revisits many of the representational strategies explored in his debut. Like Boyd, Fitzgerald’s World War I-related projects were caught up in his commercially necessitated magazine fiction and spells in Hollywood.

Postcrisis U.S. popular culture generated stories that put the capitalist social order in question by engaging the dialectics of personhood and dehumanization, normativity and deviance, freedom and imprisonment, and mobility and stasis. Many of these stories merely revise capitalism and reignite its appeal, offering outcomes that promise renewal and a return to financial and moral stability. Even the Great Gatsby returns after the Great Recession as a permutation of the many cautionary narratives about overweening economic ambition leading to inevitable failure and ruin. These postcrisis stories also contain moments of liberation from the coercive power of capitalism--moments that, if drawn together, might create an entirely new way of imagining the social order and, perhaps, encourage fantasies of liberation that might lead to their realization.

This chapter considers interwar New York hotels, the rise of hotel brands and chains, and the Ritz in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fiction. The Ritz was a fiction of global finance: a licensing apparatus for a loose, decentralised and self-propagating franchise. The value of the Ritz was not in bricks and mortar but in its name and its brand. The Ritz aesthetic was an anticipation of corporate minimalism: white walls and white curtains with minimal decorative ornaments, culminating in the evaporated surfaces of its rooftop gardens. Its whiteness and transparency were fitting architectural expressions of the Ritz as a deterritorialised brand. Like the Ritz, F. Scott Fitzgerald (or ‘Fitz’) was a branded entity. For Fitzgerald, the pleasure of the Ritz and its roof garden was in its nothingness: a desirable nowhere into which the moneyed elite could escape. This chapter reads ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ as an allegory for capital’s struggle to escape the physicality of bricks and mortar. It then considers ‘May Day’, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby, where those with means strive toward the mobility and immateriality of ‘Ritz’ and of capital itself.

Taking its title from Australian novelist Alexis Wright’s description of her novel Carpentaria as a ‘long song, following ancient tradition’, this chapter considers how antipodean relations of place interrupt abstract notions of globalization as a financial system. The first section exemplifies this by focusing on Australian/American director Baz Luhrmann, whose version of The Great Gatsby (2013), filmed in Sydney, resituates Fitzgerald’s classic novel within an antipodean context. The second section develops this through consideration of Wright’s fiction, along with that of New Zealand/Maori author Keri Hulme, so as to illuminate ways in which spiral conceptions of time, where ends merge into beginnings, contest Western epistemological frames. In the final section, this ‘long song’ is related to the musical aesthetics of Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe and English composers George Benjamin and Harrison Birtwistle. The chapter concludes by arguing that musical modes are an overlooked dimension of postmodernist culture more generally.

This chapter explores the accessories to personal existence introduced by Coco Chanel, borne out by the lives shared by Gerald and Sara Murphy, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and the events imbedded in The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. It argues that the Chanel style was derived from the ability to negotiate her way in a world run by men; that a woman once dependent on financial support from various lovers had to escape the label of “kept woman”; and that the neat little hats, casual slacks, easy-going pullovers, gorgeously fake jewels, and entrancing perfumes were inspired by the life she had had to live as well as the one she chose for herself. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section outlines the historical and social circumstances that were the “givens” of Chanel’s generation. The second section deals with “The Chanel Woman,” the figure of independence she actively created by means of the styles she introduced into the social scene. The third section examines the inner essentials of that woman and the specific external accoutrements Chanel marketed with such élan.

This chapter focuses on American novels written after World War I. It examines how writers such as Henry James and John Dos Passos highlighted the Great War's violence shaped a new aesthetic world, while others, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway associated the war with modernism. It also considers how the Great War raised awareness among American writers of the ethics and aesthetics of the machine. Finally, the chapter looks at a number of novels written after World War I, including Dos Passos's One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three Soldiers (1921), Hemingway's In Our Time (1924) and The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).

In this chapter, the author reflects on how he came to read William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald—whom he describes as the three kings. The author begins by recalling a few years ago reading in Exile's Return, Malcolm Cowley's book on the 1920s, the teenage correspondence between Cowley and Kenneth Burke. He admits that reading was his very problem in Mississippi. He also remembers the first time he read Fitzgerald's story “Absolution” and how he came to know who Faulkner was. According to the author, 1962 was the year he would first read Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. He read The Sun Also Rises, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Great Gatsby. He argues that Faulkner was the best of all three, and the very best of any American writing fiction this century. He concludes by discussing what he and his generation might have learned from the three writers.

As an extension of the early cinematic treatment of Rhapsody in Blue in chapter 2, this chapter focuses on film and television encounters with the piece from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the present, including Manhattan, Fantasia 2000, The Simpsons, Glee, and The Great Gatsby. Over time, a consensus emerges from such visual representation that closely aligns with conceptions of the piece as a sonic symbol of American ingenuity and success. Such formulations of the Rhapsody are precisely what United Airlines had in mind when it selected the piece as its corporate jingle in the late 1980s. However, the inherent flexibility of the Rhapsody has resulted in its seemingly limitless adaptability for the company. A consideration of arrangements of the piece as used in commercial advertisements and the terminal at O’Hare International Airport reveals how United has imbued the Rhapsody with a host of associations beyond those taken up by Hollywood.

Chapter 18 begins by examining how much economic inequality exists in the United States. With respect to both income and wealth inequality, the United States has the highest levels of inequality compared with other OECD countries. With respect to intergenerational economic mobility, the United States has less mobility than most other industrialized countries, with such mobility declining in recent decades. Greater levels of inequality are also associated with lower levels of mobility. Finally, high levels of inequality are correlated with increased violence, crime, and incarceration. The United States has been an outlier with respect to its failure to adequately address a wide variety of social policy issues, from child care, to criminal justice, to health care. Poverty is prime example of this failure and the predictable result of extremely high numbers of poor people.

Chapter 11 takes a short essay by Carson McCullers as the basis for a discussion of America’s national trait of being ‘homesick most for the places we have never known’. It considers this phenomenon with reference to the writings of Mark Twain, Thomas Wolfe, and F. Scott Fitzgerald who made nostalgic wonder part of the American vernacular. It also draws a comparison between the forward-looking nostalgia McCullers analyses and Robert Sherwood’s 1935 play The Petrified Forest in which the young heroine dreams of returning to a home she has never known. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—‘a veritable Ulysses of the black experience’—and a short story by McCullers called ‘The Aliens’, both of which urge a mature, hopeful, and inward-facing quest for ‘the homeness of home’.