Browsing by Author "LACEB, Rafik"

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    F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) : Variations on Forms and Themes
    (Universite Mouloud Mammeri, 2018) LACEB, Rafik
    This research seeks to explore the variations that Francis Scott Fitzgerald plays on literary forms and themes in his modernist novel The Great Gatsby. Taking my theoretical bearings from archetypal criticism, the gift theory of literature, and dialogism inspired respectively by Northrop Frye, George Bataille, and Bakhtin, I have reached the following findings. First, The Great Gatsby is unique in the sense that it blends neoclassicism with romanticism, giving birth to what is a romantic modernist novel. Second, the novel appeals to more than one mode of writing resulting in a multimodal narrative with the predominance of irony, which in the words of Frye is characteristic of the modern age. Third, The Great Gatsby resorts to multi-stylism, combining, for example, the ironic and the epigrammatic styles. The preference of metaphor over metonymy has made the author eschew the technique of the narrative of saturation for the technique of selectivity. To this, one can add the resort to the mythic method, which allows the author to give his text a writerly instead of a readerly dimension. The fifth finding resides in the anxiety of authorship. Contrary to other authors, Fitgerald is all too ready to give credit to those authors from whom he borrows his techniques and themes. Therefore, instead of the usual anxiety of influence, his novel is marked by an anxiety of authorship wherein the author is desperately looking for a way of affirming his authorship in an age marked by the emergence of cheapened literature, and a culture of consumption. Thematically, the author puts great emphasis on love as a panacea for healing the social tensions of his community. The use of Plato’s Symposium as a model for love constitutes the sixth finding. This sixth finding pertains to the ethics of the modern novel. The seventh finding has to do with the theory of masks and counterfeiting. In this regard, it is argued that the novel puts a parallel between the production of literature and the minting of paper money. This analogically led to the way the social bonds, including those related to financial speculation, are distended with people wearing masks to hide their identities. Finally, in the general conclusion, the variations on forms and themes are categorized into three types. The first type is parody. The romance, before its tragic failure, is characterized as a parody romance of the type best represented by Don Quixote. As for the other forms regarding style and theme, the variation takes the shape of stylization wherein the author follows up in the lead of previous authors without falling in the trap of imitation. The hidden polemics is perfectly exemplified in the polemical tone that Fitzgerald adopts towards the culture of consumption such as Peter calls Simon, or the Town Tattle. The hidden polemics, which in the words of Bakhtin, concerns the clash over the referent is also seen in the privilege that Fitzgerald gives to performance of identity as far as masculinity and femininity are concerned on the one hand, and that of the ethnic Other, on the other. In tune with his times, Fitzgerald borrows from romantic Orientalism the notion of “theatrical staging” of the Self and the Other that the Orient films of the time, such as The Sheikh, made very conventional.
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    The Other in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
    (university Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou, 2010) LACEB, Rafik;
    The Great Gatsby is a canonical work of literature. It is found in most of the university curricula and high school programs. In sum, it is a classic of the 1920s. Gatsby is a reflection of that period of gendered, ethnic, and racial tensions. The main characters of the narrative are all from old white established Anglo‐Saxon backgrounds. It is described to be about the suppression of otherness and change required to maintain the illusion of identity. The novel has long been noted for its author’s regional obsession with the East and the West. My aim in the present dissertation is to realize a thematic study of the novel, by looking for the way women, Jews, and Blacks and Orientals are placed in the position of “Other (s)” in relation to the identity of the main characters; an identity the author identifies with, barricades, and tries to maintain its supremacy. As the United States ended the settlement of the West with the closing of the Frontier, the beginning of the twentieth century required Americans to look for a new sense of manifest destiny. The twenties are renowned for their intolerance and broad‐scale nativism. The Great Gatsby is said to be the perfect novel of the Jazz Age, which mirrors its immediate issues. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first one is an attempt to put the novel in the context of various tensions which reflect the conservative and nativist character of the decade. The chapter also informs the reader about the major literary orientations and current of the time. It ends with the way the novel is liable to be approached from the point of view of looking for the discourse of Orientalism within it. Chapter II is about the demonstration of Fitzgerald’s ideal notion of male identity which is to be a member of Tom Buchanan’s group. Tom is the stereotyped masculine character who is even “more of a man than” Nick. Nick refuses identification and/or associations with women. Women for Nick/Fitzgerald are weak, irresponsible, absurd, dishonest, and destroyer. Chapter III focuses on the overt and oblique expressions of Fitzgerald’s anti‐ Semitism and dislike of ethnic immigrants. Ethnic immigrants were often linked with the organized crime, and constituted‐by their half whiteness‐a threat to the purity of Anglo‐Saxon identity and the homogeneity of the Nordic element. Nordics for Fitzgerald are responsible for “all the things that go to make civilization”, and are set‐that is my argument‐ in opposition to the Semite or Jewish immigrant who is the anti‐thesis of development. Chapter IV pays attention to the Fitzgeraldian ideal of whiteness and its supremacy, domestic and foreign. The major threat to “civilization going to pieces” is to end by getting “intermarriage of blacks and whites”. This chapter explains the way Fitzgerald associates Gatsby with blackness, and how Gatsby reflects the “natural segregation” of the two races. However, the second half of this last chapter is a suggestion of the study of the novel in relation to the global Western myth of the superiority of whiteness. Blackness in the United States of the time was parallel to what the colonial subject meant to imperial powers. The focus is on references to the brotherhood with English imperialism and to the early imagined geographies of the rising imperial States. N.