‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’: The Great Gatsby in the 1980s

Abstract

This essay illustrates the application of reception study, the subfield of literary history that emphasises the historical experiences of readers, to pedagogical contexts by investigating the teaching of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) in American high schools during the 1980s. Focusing on the episode in which Jay Gatsby leads Nick and Daisy on a tour of his mansion, the analysis draws on published lesson plans and other primary source documents and reimagines the contemporary cultural contexts to reconsider the novel’s lessons about social class during a decade that saw escalating wealth disparity, mirroring Fitzgerald’s 1920s and anticipating our present.

Keywords:

• The Great Gatsby
• reception study
• secondary education – the United States
• wealth disparity
• literature instruction
• 1980s

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all the students in my Fall 2017 Honors English Seminar at Stony Brook University on ‘The High School Canon’.

Notes

1. As UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women explains in the description of the Constance Coiner Undergraduate Prize, Coiner died with her daughter on TWA Flight 800 in 1996.

2. For an illustration of this diachronic perspective, visit ‘The Great Gatsby across the Changing Horizons of Student Readers’, an interactive timeline, at http://andnewman.org/tc/gatsby/ggtl

3. Referring to John F. Kennedy’s (1961) inaugural address and the 28 October 1980 Presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter (CPD 2015).

4. Cited with permission.