scholarly journals Metaphysical or Differential: Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby under Derridean Concept of Love

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1486
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hussein Oroskhan

Jacques Derrida revolutionized the Western Philosophy by reconsidering the previous ideas in a new perspective. In his view, human subjectivity is explained within the system of language and the meaning is conveyed through the concept of differánce. As such, he imparts the notion that nothing ever exists outside the text, yet the text is filled with innumerable meanings not a specific one. The net of his deconstructive thinking cast vast enough to devote close critical attention to any previously regarded metaphysical idea like love. Transcendental or metaphysical love is shorn of meaning in Derridean notion of deconstruction. For Derrida, love as a communicable sign is confined to the rules of iterability which proves the free flow of signifiers. In this regard, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as one of the most critically studied work in America is recruited to examine the Derridean deconstructive notion of love. Gatsby is exclusively focused on seeking Daisy's transcendental love even at the expense of repeating the past. Nonetheless, the evanescent fluidity of the notion of love totally ruins Gatsby's chance of ever achieving Daisy's love. Accordingly, Gatsby's ultimate failure is expected for the reason that an "absolute moment" is never devoid of any trace of past or future time. Thus, The Great Gatsby attends to why the notion of love defies any metaphysical or transcendental status and instead it has differential and deferral meaning.

JURNAL BASIS ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dewi Christa Kobis

This study is comparative study which compares Jane Eyre and the Great Gatsby by using Genetic Structuralism. These two novels were written and published from different period. Different period commonly produces different culture, tradition, habit, work, creation, effort, and even different masterpiece. Most people claim that as the time goes by, the old ones will be replaced by the youths, and everything which had been done in the past, might not be done anymore in the present or even in the future. In fact, it is necessary to dig more about the history itself to know how the people at particular period live and how they contribute a society. This study is compiled as a research to study about the characteristic of the society when the novels has been published and the period when the author of the literary works lived while mainly discussed about how different periods create different kind of stories. It also mainly focuses to take a glance on how society impacts the authors’ thought and perception to create such literary works.


2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 1191-1239
Author(s):  
Junsen Zhang

After China’s recent great success in eliminating absolute poverty, addressing relative income inequality becomes a more important issue. This survey finds that income inequality rapidly increased in the first three decades since 1978 but stabilized and slightly declined in the past decade, consistent with the well-known Kuznets hypothesis. In addition to documenting the trend and patterns over time and across groups and regions, seven sources of income inequality are systematically discussed with an effort to reconcile and extend the existing literature. Furthermore, a negative correlation is documented between income inequality and intergenerational mobility, consistent with the Great Gatsby curve observed in developed countries. (JEL D31, D63, O15, P36)


2021 ◽  
pp. 316-356
Author(s):  
Paul Giles

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.


2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
LAURA GOLDBLATT

“‘Can't Repeat the Past?’Gatsbyand the American Dream at Mid-Century” analyzesThe Great Gatsby's Cold War rise to explain its subsequent canonization. The essay uses Ernst Bloch's theory of disappointment and utopianism to dwell, in particular, upon the novel's representations of the American Dream as intimately related to failure and the promise of the New World. Bloch's insistence that disappointment is embedded within utopian formations suggests that the novel's tragic take on Gatsby's dreams is the key to its mid-century fame and its continued cultural appeal.


Author(s):  
Qiyu Sun

This paper examines high-frequency three-word clusters and their stylistic effects in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby through the analysis of the five types of clusters by means of corpus, providing a new perspective for the appreciation of the masterpiece The Great Gatsby. According to the analysis, we found that (i) Labels take up too small a percentage to reveal certain stylistic features in this novel. (ii) Speech clusters, occupying the largest percentage, are used to show characters’ mental process and indicate interactions between the narrator and readers. Large amount of negation elements attached to clusters in this group help to deepen the tragic themes, i.e. the failure of American dreams. (iii) As If X clusters serve to portray characters in an objective way and disclose Gatsby’s distorted inner world. (iv) Body Part clusters demonstrate Nick’s inclination to observe others, which enhances the credibility of his narration. (v) Time clusters denoting short time span contribute to the compact storyline. The results demonstrated that high-frequency three-word clusters are of great significance to the interpretation of The Great Gatsby, which provides a new perspective to the analysis of literary works.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


1996 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 233-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nigel Brooks

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document