Thursday, October 22, 2015
Sunday, October 18, 2015
The Great Gatsby - Reading Guide #1
The Great
Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald – Reading Guide – Number One
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a
literary work.
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and
literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and
colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Do some background
reading on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Which of
the major characters in this book is more like Fitzgerald himself?
This novel was published in 1925. Do some reading on the decade of the 1920s. According to an entry in Wikipedia on The Roaring Twenties: “The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of discontinuity associated with modernity and a break with traditions.” What do you think this quote means? Keep it in mind as you read this book. We’ll come back to it later.
In Chapter 1, we
meet four main characters. List the four
characters and, for each one, explain what we learn about them in this
chapter. What are they like? What are their connections to one
another? What can you tell, already,
about the conflicts between them? Are they happy? Why or why not?
Where does Nick
Carraway live? Where do Tom and Daisy
Buchanan live? What are some of the
differences between these two places?
What part of the
country is Nick from? How is this
important?
Useful Links:
http://www.fiction-writers-mentor.com/point-of-view-in-fiction/ (brief discussion of point of view in
fiction).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald (Wikipedia entry
on F. Scott Fitzgerald)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaring_Twenties (Wikipedia entry on “The Roaring Twenties”)
http://reading.cornell.edu/reading_project_06/gatsby/great_gatsby_resources.htm (on-line and other resources related to “The
Great Gatsby”)
What is a novel?
A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.
While Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel came into being in the early 18th century, the genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years".[1] This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.[2]
While a more precise definition of the genre is difficult, the main elements that critics discuss are: how the narrative, and especially the plot, is constructed; the themes, settings, and characterization; how language is used; and the way that plot, character, and setting relate to reality.
from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel
While Ian Watt in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel came into being in the early 18th century, the genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years".[1] This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.[2]
While a more precise definition of the genre is difficult, the main elements that critics discuss are: how the narrative, and especially the plot, is constructed; the themes, settings, and characterization; how language is used; and the way that plot, character, and setting relate to reality.
from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel
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