Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby

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Cultural Context of The Great Gatsby

• American Lit
• Week 6
• The Great Gatsby Research

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Am Lit DO NOW 2/17/15

• Turn in 1920s scavenger hunt to 3rd PERIOD
  BASKET.
• Turn in Do Nows to US MAIL BOX.
• If you did not get a novel study guide ask me
  during this process for one.

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Success today means 2/17

• Students will learn about some of the main
  characters and settings for The Great Gatsby.
• Students know they are successful when they use
  textual evidence to answer general comprehension
  questions from chapter 1.

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Introduction

• Understanding the times helps to understand the
  novel

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World War I

• World War I ended in 1918.
• Disillusioned because of the war, the generation
  that fought and survived has come to be called
  the lost generation.

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The Roaring Twenties

• While the sense of loss was readily apparent
  among expatriate American artists who remained in
  Europe after the war, back home the
  disillusionment took a less obvious form.
• America seemed to throw itself headlong into a
  decade of madcap behavior and materialism, a
  decade that has come to be called the Roaring
  Twenties.

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The Jazz Age

• The era is also known as the Jazz Age, when the
  music called jazz, promoted by such recent
  inventions as the phonograph and the radio, swept
  up from New Orleans to capture the national
  imagination.
• Improvised and wild, jazz broke the rules of
  music, just as the Jazz Age thumbed its nose at
  the rules of the past.

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The New Woman

• Among the rules broken were the age-old
  conventions guiding the behavior of women. The
  new woman demanded the right to vote and to work
  outside the home.
• Symbolically, she cut her hair into a boyish
  bob and bared her calves in the short skirts of
  the fashionable twenties flapper.

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Prohibition

• Another rule often broken was the Eighteenth
  Amendment to the Constitution, or Prohibition,
  which banned the public sale of alcoholic
  beverages from 1919 until its appeal in 1933.
• Speak-easies, nightclubs, and taverns that sold
  liquor were often raided, and gangsters made
  illegal fortunes as bootleggers, smuggling
  alcohol into America from abroad.

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Gambling

• Another gangland activity was illegal gambling.
• Perhaps the worst scandal involving gambling was
  the so-called Black Sox Scandal of 1919, in which
  eight members of the Chicago White Sox were
  indicted for accepting bribes to throw baseballs
  World Series.

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The Automobile

• The Jazz Age was also an era of reckless spending
  and consumption, and the most conspicuous status
  symbol of the time was a flashy new automobile.
• Advertising was becoming the major industry that
  it is today, and soon advertisers took advantage
  of new roadways by setting up huge billboards at
  their sides.
• Both the automobile and a bizarre billboard play
  important roles in The Great Gatsby.

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Critical Overview of the Novel

• How has the reception changed over the decades?

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The 1920s

• While fellow writers praised Fitzgeralds The
  Great Gatsby, critics offered less favorable
  reviews.

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Newspaper Reviews

• The Baltimore Evening Sun called the plot no
  more than a glorified anecdote and the
  characters mere marionettes.
• The New York Times called the book neither
  profound nor durable.
• The London Times saw it as undoubtedly a work of
  great promise but criticized its unpleasant
  characters.

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The 1930s

• Fitzgeralds reputation reached its lowest point
  during the Depression, when he was viewed as a
  Jazz Age writer whose time has come and gone.
• The Great Gatsby went out of print in 1939.
• When Fitzgerald died a year later, Time magazine
  didnt even mention The Great Gatsby.

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The 1940s

• Interest in Fitzgerald was revived with the
  posthumous book, The Last Tycoon.
• A literary critic was the first to point out
  that Gatsby, despite its Jazz Age setting,
  focused on timeless, universal concerns.

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The 1950s

• Fitzgeralds reputation soared with a new
  biography entitled The Far Side of Paradise.
• The London Times affirmed that Gatsby is one of
  the best-if not the best-American novels of the
  past fifty years.

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What is the reputation today?

• The Great Gatsbys place as a major novel is now
  assured.
• Most high schools teach this novel

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Its time for you to decide, Old Sport
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Am Lit DO NOW 2/18/15

• When is your The Great Gatsby ch. 1-2 quiz?
  (Vocab words on are the wiki from yesterday)
• What do we know about Nick Carraway from ch. 1?
• What locations have been described in ch. 1?

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Success Today Means 2/18

• Students learn about a new location, the valley
  of ashes and more about Toms moral character.
  Students will also be introduced to Dr. T.J.
  Eckleburg
• You know you are successful when you have written
  answers to all your comprehension questions for
  chapters 1-2

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Am Lit DO NOW 2/19/15

• Respond Do you remember what your social
  movement is? What are the parts of the movement
  you need to find info about? (There were 6
  sections in the original handout that told you
  what you had to research remind me today)
• On your desk, have out any notes you took for
  Chapters 1-2 of The Great Gatsby

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Success Today Means 2/19

• Students review their comprehension of chapters
  1-2 by completing a reading check.
• Students practice guessing ch. 3 vocab words
• Students learn how to create a source card and
  notecard using our research notecard system
• Students know they are successful when they
  correctly create their own source card and
  notecards

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Why notecards?

• Regular note taking works fine for small essays,
  arguments, assignments or lectures, but what
  happens when you have 50 pieces of information?
  How can you keep track of what fact comes from
  what source and be able to organize your facts by
  theme and not source?

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Notecard System Smarter

• More work at first, MUCH LESS WORK later.

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The Basics

• Source Card
• Every credible sources information is written on
  a card in MLA format (including a hanging
  indent)
• Every source gets its own number

1 Elliott, Christopher. Dont let a
natural disaster ruin your vacation.
CNN.com/travel. 2 July 2008. CNN. 10 July 2008
lthttp//www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/07/ 02/natural.di
sasters/index.htmlgt.
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The Basics (notes continued)

• Note Cards Index cards with a SINGLE fact,
  quote, statistic, example, paraphrase or summary
  (if covering a large piece of info)
• Matching source card number in upper right. So

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Source card with a notecard
1 Traveling with an emergency weather
radio is key to surviving a disaster while on
vacation Christopher Elliot
1 Overall, staying calm and finding
government aids is critical to surviving a
disaster while away from home
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Am Lit DO NOW 2/20/15

• Turn in Do Nows from Week 6 to US MAIL BOX.
• Create a smart goal for research work today. I
  need you to have 10 notes by next Friday. What
  can you get done today?
• Turn your SMART goal into me. If it is a
  challenging goal and you achieve it today
  Getting Dippied!

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Success Today Means 2/20
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Steps to work Smarter today 2/20/15

• Scan/Skim possible source
• Conduct Credibility Checklist
• If credible, copy down Source Information
• Source Info
• Authors last name, first name
• Title of webpage.
  
  
  
• Date (day month year)
• Name of sponsoring organization
• Date of access (day month year)
•  ltWebpage addressgt.