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.

1. Introduction
2. Hemingway's In Our Time (Part I)
3. Hemingway's In Our Time (Part II)
4. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Part I)
5. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (Part II)
6. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part I)
7. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part II)
8. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part III)
9. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Part IV)
10. Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (Part I)
11. Hemingway's To Have and Have Not (Part II)
12. Fitzgerald's Short Stories
13. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part I)
14. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part II)
15. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Part III)
16. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part I)
17. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part II)
18. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part III)
19. Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (Part IV)
20. Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (Part I)
21. Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night (Part II)
22. Faulkner's Light in August (Part I)
23. Faulkner's Light in August (Part II)
24. Faulkner's Light in August (Part III)
25. Faulkner's Light in August (Part IV)

This course examines major works by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, exploring their interconnections on three analytic scales: the macro history of the United States and the world; the formal and stylistic innovations of modernism; and the small details of sensory input and psychic life.

Warning: Some of the lectures in this course contain graphic content and/or adult language that some users may find disturbing.