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REVIEWER Reading Styles and Techniques: These are the styles, systems, or practices in decoding symbols for better comprehension for communication and sharing of information and ideas. Cognitive Process — the process of thinking and remembering Decoding — to recognize and interpret information...

REVIEWER Reading Styles and Techniques: These are the styles, systems, or practices in decoding symbols for better comprehension for communication and sharing of information and ideas. Cognitive Process — the process of thinking and remembering Decoding — to recognize and interpret information Deriving — to take, receive, or obtain something from a specified source Language Acquisition — the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language Skimming — method of rapidly moving the eyes over text to get only the main ideas and general overview of the content o Pre-reading o Reviewing o Reading Scanning — finding specific information such as name, date, or fact without reading the entire article Phrase Reading — a grouping of words that go together to mean something; also known as ‘chunking.’ Non-Prose Reading o Graphs o Diagrams o Charts o Maps Deep Reading — an active process of thoughtful and deliberate reading to enhance comprehension and enjoyment of a text. Also called “slow reading” Critical Approaches to the Study of Literature Critical Approaches — are different perspectives we consider when examining a piece of literature. According to Rebecca Hooker. They seek to give us answers to these questions in addition to aiding us in interpreting literature: o What do we read? o Why do we read? o How do we read? Deconstruction — suggests that language is not a stable entity and that we can never exactly say what we mean. Therefore, literature cannot give a reader any meaning because the language is too ambiguous. Feminist Criticism — this tries to correct a predominantly male-dominated critical perspective with a feminist consciousness. This form of criticism places literature in a social context and employs various disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology, and linguistics, to create a perspective that considers feminist issues. Marxist Criticism — is a strongly politically oriented criticism deriving from the theories of the social philosopher Karl Marx. Marxist critics insist that all language use is influenced by social class and economics. New Criticism — evolved out of the same root theoretical system as deconstructionism, called formalist criticism. This works with the elements of a text-only irony, paradox, metaphor, symbol, plot, etc. By engaging in extremely close textual analysis. New Historicism — focuses on the literary text as part of a larger social and historical context and the modern reader’s interaction with that work. Psychological Criticism — the basis of this approach is the idea of the existence of human consciousness — those impulses, desires, and feelings about which a person is unaware but which influence emotions or behavior. Reader-Response Criticism — removes the focus from the text and places it on the reader instead by attempting to describe what goes on in the reader’s mind while reading a text. HANDOUT 2 One Thousand and One Nights The focus of the featured great book One Thousand and One Nights is from the early Arabic Literature. 610-632 according to Islamic belief, the Qur’an (Arabic for “Recitation”) is revealed to Muhammad by God. BC  8 th A seven pre-Islamic poems collection written in gold linen dating to the 6th Century were collected and said Century to be up on the walls of the Kaaba at Mecca. These poems are also known as Al-Mu’allaqat (“hung poems”). c. 990- The stories in rhymed prose related to the encounters of the witty Abul-Fath al-Iskanderi were collected. This 1008 collection is called Maqamat (“assemblies”) written by Badi’ al-Zaman al Hamadani 13th The Story of Bayad and Riyad was written in Islamic Andalusia. This story is about the love of the Century merchant’s son for the foreign court lady. Folktales are a long part of the tradition over Arab which were orally passed down through many generations. But from the 8th century onwards along with the development of Arabian urban centers and culture under the rule of Islam, distinctions were made between al-fus ‘ha (the refined language taught at educational centers) and al-ammiyah (the language of the common people). Pre-Islamic literature written in the mother tongue – including traditional folktales – fell out of favor of the educated elite. The writers of the Arabic literature focused on poetry and nonfiction and refused to compose imaginary prose. Despite the focus on “high art” of the poetry, the collection of tales called One Thousand and One Nights on the Arabian Nights continued to be popular. This collection was made chaotically over serval centuries and there were not officially accepted as genuine versions of the tales. The One Thousand and One Nights takes the form of a frame narrative, where one story contains another set of stories within it. The framing device is the tale of Scheherazade who averts her fate by withholding the ending of stories she tells to delay her execution by the king. After 1,001 nights, the king confessed that she has changed his soul and pardons Scheherazade. The stories told by Scheherazade contains legendary locations or historical figures such as Haroun al Rashid (c.766-809), ruler of the Abbasid Caliphate during the Islamic Golden Age. The various characteristics of the stories are responsible for the wide variety of genres in the collection – from adventure, romance, fairy tale, to horror, and neve science fiction. It was not until the 18th century that the stories became known in Europe, retold by French scholar Antonine Galland in Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704-17). The manuscript from which Galland translated was incomplete, making it shorter than 1,001 nights worth of stories, so he added the Arabic tales od “Ali Baba”, “Aladdin”, and “Sinbad”. These were never part of the original One Thousand and One Nights. GRIMM’S FAIRY TALES  The word “fairy tale” was created by a French writer Madame d’Aulnoy in the late 17th century, but Charles Perrault’s contemporary retellings of the old fairy tales were better known.  The term “folklore” was first defined by English antiquarian William Thoms in his letter to The Athenaeum magazine in 1846.  Some tales like Welsh Mabinogion, such in the 14th century, have a spiritual or religious function – which folklores are not used for. Real people, places, or events are not cited. Still, instead, stories start in “once upon a time…” which readers and audiences expect random magic, reward and revenge, typical random characters, and a happy ending. BEFORE c.1350- Oral tales based on Welsh stories are collected in the Mobinogion, the earliest prose literature of Britain. 1410 Tales of Mother Goose is a collection of rewritten and original stories were created by a French author 1697 named Charles Perrault.  A popular collection of satirical folk series was published by the German author Johann Karl August 1782-87 Musaus. AFTER 1835-49 Finish folklore is celebrated in the epic poem the Kalevala by Elias Lonnrot. 1841 Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe published the Norwegian Folktales. English novelist Angela Carter wrote The Bloody Chamber to challenge the traditional folktale portrayals of 1979 women. Fairy tales are written in plain and simple styles using mainly straightforward imagery. The fairy tales without or rarely using poetic or literary references and realism (Canton, 2016). The focus of the featured great book “Grimm’s Fairytale” is the folklore collections. These folklore collections are written into one written text; cultural traditions such as oral history, fairy tales, and popular briefs are compiled since the Middle Ages. According to James Canton (2016), the Brothers Grimm, engage on an academic project to identify and preserve the spirit of the people in recording fairy tales being told across their culture. This was an epic romantic venture: interest in folklore was inspired by a rise in nationalism and cultural pride, and the purpose of the Grimms’ collection was no different. Nor were they the only European scholars to undertake such an enterprise, and their peer group at university shared their enthusiasm for folk traditions. But the Grimms’ work, as reflected in their Children’s and Household Tales, represents the most magnificent body of stories collected in Europe and is the most widely translated and read. W H Auden declared Grimms’ tales “among the few common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded.” The methodology for gathering stories did not include sorties into the woods, as is often picturesquely believed. The Grimms’ sources generally came to them, and some stories were already written down, such as “The Juniper Tree,” sent to them by painter Philip Otto Runge. In their first edition, the Grimms wrote for a mainly adult audience. It was only after Edgar Taylor’s English translation of their work in 1823 was successful with children that they made revisions to sanitize the German stories. For example, their first version of “Rapunzel” openly referred to her pregnancy (outside marriage), but in the revised version, she simply fattens. Yet violence was not necessarily minimized. The French Cinderella, Cendrillon, in Charles Perrault’s tale, forgives her stepsisters and finds good husbands for them. But in the Grimms’ punitive version, Cinderella’s helper- birds blind the sisters by pecking out their eyes. Violence notwithstanding, the popularity of the Grimms’ collected tales has endured, and they have sustained multiple interpretations and rewrites in various media over the years. The romantic depiction of “Once upon a time” continues to manifest inextinguishable truths, which, along with the allure of a happy and harmonious ending, appeal across the generations. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm  Known as the Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) were celebrated German academics, cultural researchers, linguists, and lexicographers. The oldest surviving sons of a family of six children, they were raised in Hanau, Hesse. Despite poverty following the death of their lawyer father, they were educated at the University of Marburg, thanks to a well-connected aunt. The Grimms are credited with developing an early methodology for collecting folk stories that are now the basis of folklore studies. They were also notable philologists (studying the language in written historical sources). Both brothers also worked on a monumental (32-volume) German dictionary, which was unfinished in their lifetimes. PRIDE AND PREJUDICE The early to mid-18th century saw the rise of the novel and, a little later, the development of Romanticism in literature. By the close of the 18th century, however, a new genre had emerged in England – the novel of manners, which moved away from the excess of emotions and flights of fancy common to Romanticism. Instead, it emphasized the beliefs, manners, and social structures of particular groups of people. These novels were often dominated by women – both as authors and as protagonists – and for this reason, were sometimes wrongly dismissed as trivial. Jane Austen’s novels are the prime examples of such literature, gently satirizing the social mores of the English country gentry, as well as poking fun at the overindulgent drama of Gothic Romanticism. Austen highlights the vulgarities and folies of the English upper classes: the importance of the rank, the stigma of the social inferiority, and the system of the patronage are played out via balls, visits, and society gossip. In Pride and Prejudice, the reader follows the Bennet sisters in their quest for an eligible bachelor. For women, a good marriage was crucial for maintaining or improving one’s social status. The novel is told mainly through the eyes of its principal character, Elizabeth Bennet (Austen’s favorite among her heroines), a good and well intentioned young woman. She is one of the five daughters of the intelligent but put-on Mr. Bennet, a country gentleman, and his pushy, vulgar wife; their marriage is a perfect example of how not to do it. Elizabeth meets the aristocratic Fitzwilliam Darcy, who is drawn to her despite himself; however, she finds his arrogant pride and his supercilious behavior offensive. He is contrasted with his equally wealthy but unaffected friend, Bingley, to takes a liking to Elizabeth’s older sister, Jane. Yet when the flighty younger sister, Lydia, scandalously elopes with the dashing officer George Wickham, threatened to disgrace the entire family, it is Darcy who unexpectedly steps in to help. Elizabeth’s pride, prejudice, and inexperience lead her to make errors to judgment (both Wickham and Darcy) that she must pay for, but through these trials, she grows into a mature adult. Darcy, similarly, has to grow out of his pride to prove he is a worthy match for her, ins spite of his higher social class. Indeed, through the use of subtle wit and irony, Austen makes clear that good breeding does not necessarily equate with good manners (although good manners may well be indicative of good morals). While the landscape of Pride and Prejudice might appear to be narrow, it nevertheless keenly probes the manners and morals of its day. Jane Austen The daughter of a relatively prosperous country person, Jane Austen was born in Stevenson rectory, Hampshire, England, in 1775, the seventh of eight children. As a child, she read voraciously, having access to her father’s library, which was uncommon for girls at the time. She started writing in her early teens, producing an early version of Pride and Prejudice, entitled First Impressions, between 1796 and 1797. In 1800 her father decided to retire, and the family moved to Bath; Jane was unhappy there. In 1809 she moved to Chawton, Hampshire, with her mother and sister, where she wrote daily. It was her observations of genteel life in Hampshire that furnished her novels. Despite writing a great deal about marriage, she never married herself, although she did receive a proposal. She died in 1817 at the age of 41. STORY 1: ASHPUTTEL by the Brothers Grimm COMPARISON 1: Differences with Disney’s “Cinderella” DEPICTING REAL LIFE Text Structures The vast majority of texts are written for one or more of these three purposes: To make an argument  To inform To tell a story. You must be able to unpack these five (5) text structures and study their components to fully understand and analyze informational texts, whether they're reading textbooks, news articles, or works of literary nonfiction. 1. Description It is pretty straightforward. Texts that use this structure describe something. With few exceptions, these texts also present plenty of details about what they're describing. A text using this structure might also: Tell you why we are describing something Tell you why the described topic is important Provide examples of the described topic(s) Descriptive texts are everywhere—in novels, works of literary nonfiction, news articles, and science textbooks—which makes sense because the entire point of description is to present information. Example: “Two distinct desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado, come together in Joshua Tree National Park. A fascinating variety of plants and animals make their homes in a land sculpted by strong winds and occasional torrents of rain. Dark night skies, a rich cultural history, and surreal geologic features add to the wonder of this vast wilderness in southern California” - National Parks Service. 2. Sequence/Instruction/Process This text structure covers a few purposes: Sequential instructions (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3; do this, then do that, and finally do this) Chronological events (This happened, then this happened, then this happened, etc.) Arguments that use evidence to support a claim (presenting evidence from least to most convincing) When you read or write a text with this structure, order is the key. Texts that use this format don't present any event or instruction out of order, as doing so would make its directions more difficult to follow. As a ludicrous example, imagine a cake recipe in which preheating the oven is the last step. It would just be confusing and odd. Poorly written instructions just aren't worth your time. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the sequence/instruction/process text structure: Example 1: “World War I, also known as the Great War, began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918.” - World War I (history.com) Example 2: “Pulse flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor to combine. Add butter and process until the largest pieces of butter are pea-size. Transfer to a large bowl.” BA’s Best Apple Pie (bonappetit.com) 3. Cause/Effect Cause/Effect: text structures explain, well, causes and effects. Sounds pretty simple! However, works that use this structure can become complex when an effect has multiple causes (or vice versa). You will encounter complex examples of cause-effect when they read historical texts. Many historical events had more than one cause, all related in ways that can be difficult to unpack. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the cause/effect text structure: Example: “After inflating, the universe slowed down its expansion rate but continued to grow, as it does still. It also cooled significantly, allowing for the formation of matter — first neutrinos, electrons, quarks, and photons, followed by protons and neutrons.” - How Did the Big Bang Happen? (astronomy.com) 4. Compare/contrast: This text structure involves a comparison between multiple things, revealing how they are similar and different. Ensure to know that contrasting two or more things doesn't necessarily mean identifying them as good or bad. Comparisons relay the differences; therefore, one thing could have positive and negative traits. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the compare/contrast text structure: Example: “Beethoven has a much more fiery personality. Whereas Mozart’s music is clean and precise, Beethoven employs many surprises in his music. Many times he will build up the music as if it’s leading to something only to suddenly get soft – his trademark use of subito piano.” — Mozart vs. Beethoven (livingpianos.com) 5. Problem/Solution This text structure involves two parts: The author identifies a problem The author details a solution to this problem Problem/Solution can be a very complex text structure, as it necessitates using other structures, too. The author needs to describe the problem. The author would likely also explain the causes and effects of the problem to argue in favor of their solutions. Does implementing the author's solutions involve following a series of specific steps? That involves another structure. What if the author wants to mention other potential solutions and then explain why their solution is the best one? Oh, hello there, Compare/Contrast! What's important here, as it is with any text in which an author marshals an argument, is that the author uses only the information needed to advance the argument or refute counterarguments. When you examine a text that uses the Problem/Solution text structure, they should examine at least two things: the argument as a whole and the individual components of it. Knowing that aspects of other text structures might appear in the Problem/Solution will help you examine the argument's components. That's why it's essential that you understand and can analyze the other four structures if you want them to be able to examine the Problem/Solution effectively. Example: “Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2). But it doesn't have to be that way. One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling, or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.” — 10 Solutions for Climate Change (scientificamerican.com). Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The concept of “childhood” was only invented in the 18th century when the middle classes began to see the value of a child’s innocence and play. Children were rarely mentioned for most of the literary history, occasionally appearing in such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In the 19th century, Charles Dickens sometimes placed children in the foreground of his stories, but only in books for adults. Most tales written for, rather than about, children were adaptations of adult stories or moral didactics. In the early 19th century, The Brothers Grimm’s illustrated folktales, collected initially for adults, were criticized as unsuitable for young people because of their sexual and violent content—later editions were adapted to be more child-friendly. Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote his Fairy Tales (1835-37) specifically for children, caused an outcry by failing to include a moral. In Wonderland, the laws of nature and society are turned on their heads: time and space behave unpredictably; animals talk; and anything might happen at tea parties and games. Fantasy evokes the child’s sense of threat in an adult world. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writing for children enjoyed a golden age founded on increasing literacy, the growth of commercial publishing, and recognition of the creative potential of a child’s world. Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), by English author Thomas Hughes, started the school story tradition; another new genre was the coming-of- age-tale, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) in the USA. Other classics include Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880- 81), from Switzerland, and Scotsman JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential books of this flowering. Regarded as the first masterpiece for children in English, its fantastical story is a marked departure from the prevailing realism of literature at the time. On a July day in 1862, Charles Dodgson, a young mathematics don, went rowing with a male friend and three young sisters on the Thames near Oxford and told a story of a girl named Alice – which was also the name of one of his passengers, Alice Liddell, aged ten. So Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland took shape, appearing as a handwritten book and then as a publication under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In the story, seven-year-old Alice falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a surreal universe. She negotiates alone a world of strange creatures, strange attitudes, strange happenings, and strange linguistics logic. This is the focus of the book and its principal theme. The book’s coherence partly comes from Alice's entertaining, unorthodox logic. As she falls down the rabbit hole, she wonders if she is going to the land in the “Antipathies” (Antipodes) and imagines herself appearing ignorant when she has to ask whether she is in Australia or New Zealand. Her observation shows Carroll brilliantly inhabiting a child’s frankness: “No, it’ll never do to ask; perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.” Alice always wonders about who she is, the rules of this peculiar world, and how she can regain normality, a common childhood issue. Her bewilderment initially focuses on her being the wrong size, too big or too small to do as she wants. After she meets the Caterpillar, new anxiety arises, and the challenge of repetition, often rudely, is contradicted. Towards the end, with the Queen’s repeated plea for a beheading, the possibility of violence adds to the tension. The characters that Alice meets are primarily animals. Apart from Alice and her sister, who features before and after the adventure, the only human characters are the Mad Hatter and the Duchess since the King and Queen of Hearts are playing cards. Parents do not make an appearance, nor is there any reference to them. Yet Victorian adults accustomed to the convention might also see the inversions of everyday life that imprison Alice as liberating. One of the attractions of nonsense is that it offers a playground for the imagination and arguably for the satisfaction of subliminal needs, including occasional escape from social rules. Alice does not refer at the end to having learned any lessons from her adventures. However, she does, in the course of the book, become more forthright, and by the time of the trial scene near the end, she is capable of saying to the Queen that her perverse sense of justice is “Stuff and nonsense!” When she is child-sized again, her final act is to insist that the playing cards are just that – inanimate things – after which they fly into the air. By force of character, she has punctured the illusion. The coda, featuring Alice’s older sister, is beautifully judged. It starts with her dreaming “after a fashion” since a fully-fledged dream would be less subtle than this elusive mind-state. First, she affectionately imagines Alice herself; then, the weird characters Alice describes pass in front of her. Finally, she imagines Alice becoming a “grown woman” but keeping the “simple and loving heart” of her childhood and passing on the story of Wonderland to a new generation. Lewis Carroll Born in 1832 in Cheshire, England, Charles Dodgson (best known later by his pen name, Lewis Carroll) was the son of a clergyman. He earned a first-class degree in mathematics from Christ Church, Oxford, and from 1855 he held a lectureship there until his death. He was also ordained as a deacon. His first published work, in 1856, was a poem on solitude. Dodgson was well connected, his friends including the critic and writer John Ruskin, and the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was a notable photographer, taking portraits of the poet Alfred Tennyson, the actress Ellen Terry, and many children. He died in 1898, at 65, as a result of pneumonia after a severe case of influenza. By this time Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was the most popular children’s book in Britain. Queen Victoria was one of its admirers. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain With little history to speak of and few literary traditions to anchor them, US writers in the 19th century were engaged in holding up a mirror to the varied, complex populations of their rapidly evolving nation. One author blazed a trail, setting his story specifically in the Mississippi Valley in the Midwest with a poor white boy narrator like no other. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn relates his adventures in regional dialect, salted with philosophical musings and homespun wisdom, and along the way, becomes one of the first authentic voices in American literature.  What is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that led Ernest Hemingway to declare it the starting point for all American literature? For a start, it empowered generations of American writers to shift literature from its center in the New England colonies and site their works on home soil with local color and vernacular speech. But what is also remarkable is the radical heart of this free flowing “boy’s own” story. Twain’s novel was published after the American Civil War (1861-65) but is set 40-50 years earlier when slaveholding persisted in the South and settlers scrabbled for land in the West. Huck’s original thoughts reflect the numerous contradictions at the heart of American society. Early in the narrative, Huck introduces himself to the reader as an established character from a previous novel by Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer gives his account credibility in social history. He feigns death to escape the civilizing folk of Missouri and the brutality of his father and begins his journey down the Mississippi on a raft in the company of Jim, a runaway slave. As they drift south, backwoods society's brutal reality encroaches whenever they contact the shore. In these one-horse towns, lynch mobs and gangs administer justice; tricksters play to the weakness of the crowd; loud-mouthed drunks are summarily shot, and a young gentleman who befriends Huck is murdered in a family feud. In a text that is peppered with the offensive word “nigger”, subversion is played out through the talks between Huck and Jim. Newly escaped from being sold down the river by his mistress, Jim concludes: “Yes – en I’s rich now … I own myself, en I’s worth eight hundred dollars. I wished I had the money.” Living on the raft in idyllic self-sufficiency, Huck and Jim are cast adrift from their social order, and a friendship develops. Later, as Huck wrestles with the southern ideology that demands that he should turn Jim in, he can remember the man only as a friend” “we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing … somehow couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him…” by the time Tom Sawyer, the eponymous hero of Twain’s earlier novel, steps on to the page, Huck’s emotional development is almost complete. Although it was condemned as “coarse” when first published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn injected American writing with new energy, style, and color. Its focus on the speech of real Americans stretched from the voices of John Steinbeck’s dispossessed farmers in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to recent first-person narratives such as Drown (1996) and Junot Diaz’s stories of Dominica Americans in New Jersey. Mark Twain Born on 30 November 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which served as the model for “St Petersburg” in Huckleberry Finn. After his father's death, Clemens left school at the age of 12. He worked as a typesetter and occasional writer and, in 1857, became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. During the Civil War, he prospected for silver in Nevada, then started writing for newspapers, adopting the pen name Mark Twain. In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, settled in Connecticut, and had four children. Despite the success of this novel, a series of poor investments bankrupted him. Still, from 1891, he lectured widely, enjoyed international celebrity, and restored his finances as Mark Twain wrote 28 books and many short stories, letters, and sketches. He died in 1910. The Great Gatsby The author and literary hostess Gertrude Stein, talking with Ernest Hemingway, spoke of a “lost generation” of the young – those who had served in World War I. Hemingway claimed that Stein first heard the words from a garage owner who had serviced her car, an anecdotal detail that resonates suggestively with the garage scenes in The Great Gatsby. “Lost” in this context means disoriented or alienated, as opposed to disappeared. After Hemingway’s use of it in the epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises, the phrase “Lost Generation” came to refer to a group of young American expatriate writers in the creative melting-pot of Paris in the 1920s, which included F Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and Hemingway himself. World War I had left its mark, and they were restless and cynical, searching for a meaningful experience in love, writing, drink, and hedonism. Fitzgerald, one of the Lost Generation’s most essential writers, found himself seduced by the scintillating surfaces of the “Jazz Age” of the 1920s, while at the same time being keenly aware of its defective moral values and the emptiness of its promise of a better life for all. His most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, tells a personal story of Gatsby’s doomed dream of love. However, at the same time, it is a story about the doomed American Dream – its promise of a better world revealed as a sham. New money, new values Fitzgerald saw the Jazz Age as an era of miracle and excess. New post-war prosperity was centered on Wall Street, where vast fortunes were made trading in stocks and bonds. The ideal of the self-made man was an attractive antidote to the power of old money passed on by inheritance and marriage among the “best” families. The 1920s in the USA seemed to offer new social mobility, healing class wounds, and challenging snobbery. Those who had sought their fortunes in the West now came East again, to make their fortunes and to spend their wealth on magnificent homes, fine things, and high living – such was the dream, anyway. But the reality was that wealth for some led to the impoverishment of others, and at the same time, gave rise to a culture of surface glitter that was morally and spiritually empty at its core. The fakery of all kinds abounded, and snobbery still existed – it had just found new targets. After the passing of the 18th Amendment in 1919, which prohibited the sale of alcohol, many entrepreneurs channeled their talents into bootlegging – the smuggling of illegal liquor, much of it sold in speakeasies (illicit bars). Racism was rife too; in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan expresses the supremacist view that “if we don’t look out the white race will be will be utterly submerged.” Radiance and rottenness Fitzgerald saw his novel as “a purely creative work – not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world.” That radiance, reflected in a passionate prose style suffused with a romantic glow, is seen in the dazzling glamour of fashionable East Coast society that Fitzgerald takes for his subject. Jay Gatsby owns a colossal mansion, in the style of a French hôtel de ville (city hall), in West Egg, on the shore of Long Island, outside New York. Gatsby is an enigma, an incomer from the Midwest around whom many rumors circulate – that he has killed a man; that his claim to an Oxford education is a lie; that he made his money bootlegging. Every Saturday, he throws decadent parties, with hundreds of guests, as described by the novel’s narrator, Nick Carraway, who rents a small house next door. There are hilarity and jazz in these revels, but also a great deal of drunkenness and falling out, especially between couples. Indeed, men and women speak to each other throughout the book in dialogue that is flippant and insincere. Nick gets to know Gatsby and learns his secret: that for five years, he has been obsessively in love with the beautiful socialite Daisy Buchanan, who happens to be Nick’s cousin, and who is now married to Tom, a wealthy college friend of Nick’s. Daisy is the reason Gatsby bought his mansion on the opposite shore from the Georgian Colonial house she shares with Tom. All Gatsby’s wealth, acquired from shady business dealings with a mafioso-style crook called Meyer Wolfshiem, is paraded with the sole intention of winning back his lost love, now that he finally has the capital to support her. Color and time Jordan and Daisy are first seen in white dresses, but neither is as innocent as this choice of color might suggest. Colour in The Great Gatsby is symbolic of the book’s themes: Gatsby wears a pink suit and drives a yellow Rolls-Royce – hues denoting his desperate need to make an impression. One of the book’s most prevalent symbols is green, the color of the light at the end of Daisy’s mooring dock, which Gatsby gazes at yearningly from across the water. In the final pages, alone in Gatsby’s empty garden, Nick has a vision of the “fresh, green breast of the new world,” glimpsed by the first settlers to reach Long Island; he then muses on Gatsby’s belief in that symbolic “green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.” It is here, in the green light and the green land, that the novel’s concerns with individual and national destiny converge. At the end of the book, feeling that the East is haunted after the book’s final tragedy and “distorted beyond my eyes’ powers of correction,” Nick returns to his Midwestern home. In his shifting, worldly, highly nuanced perceptions and sympathies, Nick is as much the novel’s subject as Gatsby. The thought he leaves us with is that the past pulls us back irresistibly: dreams of progress are fool’s gold. Belated acclaim When he was planning his novel in 1923, Fitzgerald wrote that he wanted to produce “something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned.” He achieved this ambition with panache, but the book initially received mixed reviews and sold poorly. By the time of his death, Fitzgerald thought of himself as a failure: during the last year of his life, only 72 copies of his nine books were recorded as sales in his royalty statements. Nowadays, The Great Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s subsequent work, Tender is the Night, are widely regarded as among the most significant US novels ever written. Tender is the Night follows a narrative that fictionalizes strands in Fitzgerald’s deeply troubled life, including adultery, mental illness, and an acute sense of personal and creative failure. The Great Gatsby is the more acclaimed of the two novels. It is particularly admired for its forensic exposure of a flawed milieu; its finely judged prose, combining first-person informality with superbly cadenced description; its brilliantly telling dialogue, capable of revealing a moral vacuum in the briefest of exchanges; and its structural accomplishment – for example, in the placing of Jordan’s account of Gatsby’s back-story, which is both a flashback (telling of past events) and a flash-forward (because Tom says of Jordan’s revelations out of sequence). Like the rest of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald may have been reacting to the mood of his times – disillusionment, a loss of moral bearings, and the focus on the material rather than the spiritual – but his novel transcends the moment of its creation. This is in part because of its continuing relevance in today’s climate of celebrity, corporate greed, and a world economy driven by inflated asset prices. But the book is also timelessly crucial because every aspect of it, aesthetically, bears witness to Fitzgerald’s unassailable mastery of his art. F Scott Fitzgerald Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. In 1917 he dropped out of Princeton University to join the army. He fell in love with Zelda Sayre, the daughter of a judge, marrying her after his first novel, This Side of Paradise, brought him success at the age of 24. He supported the family (they had one daughter) by writing stories for popular magazines. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, confirmed his reputation as chief chronicler and critic of the Jazz Age. In 1924 he moved with Zelda to the French Riviera to write The Great Gatsby. The couple later shuttled between France and the USA. Fitzgerald had a troubled relationship with alcohol; after Tender Is the Night came out in 1934, he struggled for two years with drink and depression. In 1937 he tried his hand at writing for Hollywood and died of a heart attack there in 1940, aged 44. The Little Prince Many writers were forced to flee their homelands before and during World War II, and a somber, sad, and elegiac tone is often evident in the literature produced in exile by such writers. The latter include Joseph Roth, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, and Paul Celan. Also among this exodus was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who wrote The Little Prince in New York after he had left France, following its occupation by the Nazis. Like many of the great literary works from this era, The Little Prince is not strictly a “war” novel, but the political and social context shapes that the war brought about. Saint- Exupéry’s book has been read in numerous ways: as a general moral and philosophical fable, as a children’s fairy tale, as an autobiographical story that has been re-imagined as fantasy; and as a direct reflection of its times. These interpretations have all been made of other works of exile literature, which commonly lament a lost way of life. State of dislocation Given its genesis in a time of displacement, it is not surprising that the title character of Saint Exupéry’s novel is an alien boy who falls to Earth in the eerie landscape of the Sahara Desert. The narrator, a pilot who has crash-landed, encounters the boy there. Abandonment, wandering, escape, and instability characterize the narrative of The Little Prince, which presents us with a seemingly simple children’s story. But like all good examples of such fiction, it is a tale for both old and young. Saint-Exupéry takes from classic children’s literature the idea that the state of childhood is one of transition, where difference predominates. The prince is literally and metaphorically an alien wandering the Earth – a child lost in an adult world. But as a character, his alienness is infused with a moral philosophy that celebrates dissimilarity and questions the world of adults, which has led to war – and, in Saint-Exupéry’scase, an exile from home. Like a child’s painful maturation into the unknowable realm of adulthood, the state of exile is a process of losing and relearning one’s place in the world. Tolerating difference This strangeness of the adult world, coupled with the novel’s celebration of the little prince’s alienness, has also been read as a political critique. The baobab trees, which infest the home planet of the little prince, have been interpreted as a reference to the contemporary “sickness” of Nazism and its equally grasping nature as it moved across Europe destroying all in its path, including Saint-Exupéry’s beloved France. The narrator warns about “some terrible seeds on the little prince’s planet. … And a baobab, if you tackle it too late … will bore right through a planet with its roots.” In contrast, the novel positions the humanist philosophy of rationality, compassion, and respect for differences against this spreading disaster. The alien boy advises us all that “eyes are blind. One must look with the heart”. The Little Prince is a timeless yet timely exploration of the value of human life. Like other writers in exile, Saint- Exupéry explores loss and change against a backdrop of upheaval and alienation, which fosters kindness towards others and toleration of difference. Antoine De Saint-Exupéry Born to a French aristocratic family in 1900, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had a strict upbringing in a château near Lyon. During his national service, he became an aviator. Before World War II, he was a commercial pilot who pioneered airmail routes in Europe, South America, and Africa. When war broke out, he joined the French Air Force and flew reconnaissance missions until 1940. During these years he produced many well-known works, but The Little Prince was not written until he and his wife, Consuelo Suncin, fled heartbroken into exile after France’s defeat and its armistice with Germany. Vilified by his government and depressed by his stormy marriage, Saint-Exupéry flew his last flight in 1944, over the Mediterranean, where it is believed he was shot down. His posthumous reputation has recovered him as one of France’s literary heroes.