Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
This plenary celebrates the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most famous work by examining it anew through the novel’s interest in materiality (the physical components of daily life) as opposed to materialism (the standard reading of the book as one of financial excess and routines of conspicuous consumption). Shortly after the book opens, Nick Caraway refers to Gatsby as “one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away,” but little has been done until now about this reference to seismographs. This paper delves a little more into seismographic activity in the novel and how this links to Carraway’s retelling of a very singular American dream, one which he sets against a wider series of shocks and tremors that map the fissures of American social and cultural reality in the 1920s.
Period
10 Apr 2025
Event title
17th Spanish Association for American Studies Conference