This essay argues that The Great Gatsby may be fruitfully read against African American models of identity formation of the late teens and Twenties. Like Gatsby, passing and Americanization fiction render racial and national identity theatrical. Gatsby's parties, given minimal attention in Fitzgerald scholarship, miniaturize the process of identity formation that characterizes the novel as a whole. Theatrical modes of identity formation are not limited to the novel's parvenus, however: showing how even the novel's elite are fully implicated in the culture of imitation, Fitzgerald refutes the possibility of any identity as "the real thing."

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White Skin, White Mask: Passing, Posing, and Performing in The Great Gatsby

Against Melancholia: Contemporary Mourning Theory, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and the Politics of Unfinished Grief

Gatsby's Ghost: Post-Traumatic Memory and National Literary Tradition in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

The sense of loss so central to Hemingway's work inscribes a social rupture with autonomous and potent masculinity—and in this sense his work responds to the crisis in gender in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Hemingway responded to this crisis, along with a dominant strain of American modernism, in a melancholic manner. He sought to keep psychically alive what he insisted had become socially impossible. The Sun Also Rises enacts this process with particular complexity, staging Hemingway's identification with two incompatible and lost forms of manhood—the sentimental and the invulnerable—neither of which he is able to relinquish for a masculinity more currently viable.

Melancholy modernism: gender and the politics of mourning in the sun also rises

Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Jay gatsby is dead; the narrative is the black fruit of Nick Carraway's tacit pledge to remember: \"I don't like casualness, I don't like waters that close over your head without a bubble or a ripple when you go. The feeling that they shouldn't became a sort of obsession, then finally a horror to me, that Autumn on Long Island. . . .\"2 But is such remembrance necessarily a kind of mourning? My answer is no, because Nick writes in order to preserve rather than to relinquish the dead, to protect a hallucinatory simulation of the shelter that the dead had supplied rather than to acknowledge, not only the fact of the corpse that the rain falls on, but also the anomaly, the startling and repellent presence, of a soggy new world. By no means an occasion for euphoria, a truly new world, and not really new either, but, as is always the case, only staved off until now, newly apprehended when shelter fails. If the mourning is strong, then the dead was an intrinsic part of a system for creating and maintaining sense; that system decapitated, its elements remain, but as gargoyles that no longer express the moral or imaginative meanings that had been assigned to them during the course of life with what is now the dead. Going into a café to meet Pierre, only to find that Pierre has missed the appointment, to reprise a famous anecdote from Being and Nothingness, transforms the cafe phenomenologically into absence-of-

The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness

He had just come up from the South Seas with John LaFarge, who had reluctantly crawled away toward New York to resume the grinding routine of studio work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as a choice, have gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly that he had felt. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

Mitchell Breitwieser

Papers

The Great Gatsby: Grief, Jazz and the Eye-Witness

Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick and Mana