Approaches to Teaching Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (review)

A couple of years back, after a student told me she had kept company with The Great Gatsby as an assigned text in every college semester for five straight, zigzagging through an undergraduate major in English, I wheezed over to the university bookstore to see if such a pattern were really possible. A way to test for it is to pause in the aisles where required books are stacked by course and section, and let the eyes slide out of focus, like looking for one of those concealed images—space ship, smirking clown—in the dot-art pictures they sell at the mall. Sure enough: in that term at least, the familiar spine of the paperback, battered from multiple uses and sell-backs, popped up all along the shelf with frightening frequency.

If that holds true at your own institution, and if you consider that hundreds of thousands of American students also have to negotiate this novel at least once in high school as well (as standard fare in an AP course), then what most of us are really up to is re-teaching The Great Gatsby, extending, refreshing, and complicating whatever it is that our students think they were taught before. In the Preface and the Introduction to this volume, Jackson Bryer and Nancy VanArsdale, as veteran and established scholars in both American Literature and American Studies, countenance that reality: four hundred thousand copies sold annually, and surveys attesting that most of us in the colleges know that we're leading a return visit.

The MLA has been turning out this "Approaches to Teaching" series for a long time; these books provide cover for that professional monopoly, against innuendo that they have lost relevance to basic trades that keep them funded. The format of these volumes frontloads the material that working teachers will want to reach for in a hurry—concise descriptions of biographies, collections of criticism, contemporary reviews, high-quality book chapters and articles; and Bryer's presentation in the Gatsby guide is distinguished for its clarity and for the shrewdness of the choices it makes, sorting through a ton of published commentary and organizing it by subject and theme. VanArsdale's catalog and commentary on web resources is also a well-written and discriminating shortcut; and James L. W. West III's straightforward history of "The Composition and Publication of The Great Gatsby" can arm conscientious instructors with everything they need to know about how this novel came into being.

After all that, the volume presents a buffet of critical engagements with the novel—some of them plausibly centered on the dynamics and cultural context of an undergraduate classroom, and some of them not. Though none of the contributed essays directly addresses the challenges or opportunities that might inhere in rereading and re-teaching Gatsby, most of them implicitly address a question that hangs in the air, with regard to a book whose very name has taken on iconic presence in our popular and literary culture: why so much fuss for so long about a short book in which a flashy, sleazy guy from nowhere obsesses about an essentially-worthless socialite and for his troubles gets shot in a swimming pool, a plotline that doesn't seem all that different from nightly fare on the CW Network? Kim Curnutt's piece on "Modernity and Milieu" provides cogent answers, highlighting "a profound shift in cultural conceptions of identity" (40), brought on by the rise of mass culture, by the marketing of personal style, by the erosion of old social orders, and by "the growing threat of anonymity in mass society" (41), a gaudy world offering up the possibility that anyone—random somebodies here and there—could become anything they wanted, and that most would be nothing at all. Jonathan Barron's essay on the theme of regionalism and class is one of the few that countenances the potential importance of exactly where, right now, The Great Gatsby is being...