AMST 246 - Lecture 4 - Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby | Open Yale Courses

Professor Wai Chee Dimock begins her discussion of The Great Gatsby by highlighting Fitzgerald’s experimental counter-realism, a quality that his editor Maxwell Perkins referred to as “vagueness.” She argues that his counter-realism comes from his animation of inanimate objects, giving human dimensions of motion and emotion to things as varied as lawns, ashes, juicers, telephones, and automobiles.  She concludes with a short meditation on race in The Great Gatsby and encourages a closer reading of the novel’s instances of racial differentiation. Chapter 1. Maxwell Perkins and the “Vagueness” of Gatsby [00:00:00] Professor Wai Chee Dimock:  We'll get started on The Great Gatsby. I'm sure that you guys have your own views on the novel. So what I'll be talking about today is in some sense a more focused or sharp-edged take on Gatsby, which you're certainly free to dispute in section. But I want to begin with Maxwell Perkins. And his name actually came up last time -- when Fitzgerald read

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