The Great Gatsby Book Blogs

Welcome to the Grade 12 University English Book Blog

http://kyletezak.com/portfolio/the-four-icon-challenge/

Several times during the reading and discussions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby, you will post your Discussion Presentation Notes before you deliver and discuss your responses to and observations about the novel.

The class will have an opportunity to post comments and create working notes for the class.

Book Blog Posts should be:

• carefully crafted, articulate, and academic in both language, tone, and content
• analytical and critical in both observations and questions the blogger poses
• primarily your reading of the novel though in exceptional cases, reference with secondary sources that were consulted
• lengthy enough to cover all aspects of the question or prompt with textual reference in either quotations or page numbers
• organized in sentence and paragraph structure

The purpose of the blog is:

• to provide readily accessible notes for the whole class which is helpful in exam preparation
• to allow students to comment and add further observations to the notes of bloggers
• to provide an interactive social media platform for critical thinking
• to provide practice with on line discussion in preparation for University

The Breakdown

Hello everyone,

This blog is going to be organized for optimum ease of information concerning our deconstruction of the Great Gatsby. As there are so many of us here are the instructions to keep everything in order.

Each group has different sets of questions for each section. The answers will continue to be posted in the Pages for your group. To post on the page you can only leave a comment, in this comment include a Title (your Group, and the question), the answer, who wrote it (minimum first and or last name), and finally Tags. The tags MUST follow the categories listed bellow exactly (this includes capitalization) so they remain uniform. For multiple tags separate them with a comma.

That's it!

From there I will repost to the main page (but under "later posts"). Thus if you have any comments and opinions (ESPECIALLY good ones discussed in the presentations) please comment on the repost. This also helps so it's less confusing on the group pages as it has already started to.

Then when it comes to writing about the Great Gatsby all you need to do is click the label on the side and all posts including relevant information will be there.

Thank you!
Jen

Label Categories:

Gatsby
Myrtle
Daisy
Tom
Jordan
Nick
Valley of Ashes
Setting
Automobiles
Green/Blue
Yellow/White
Silver/Black/Grey

John Green Videos

Hello everyone,

For those who missed the video in class or simply would like to go over it again here is John Green's deconstruction of the symbolism in the Great Gatsby.

John Green: Living the Dream in the Valley of Ashes

And for further help, here is John Green's quick critical reading of the first chapter:

John Green: Gatsby's American Dream (critical reading of Ch 1)


Thank you,
Jennifer

Great Gatsby Movie Trailer

Literary Lenses

Literary Lenses

Reading a text through literary lenses is a neat way of looking at a text through the different points of view. It gives us a good idea of the variety of outlooks and widens our perspective on a much larger scale. There are many different types of lenses, however the three lenses we focused on as a class include – Feminist, Marxist and Psychoanalytic lens.

Feminism gives emphasis to analyzing how women are portrayed in the text. It explores the negative, positive or mediocre qualities of women specifically. The key idea is to critically think about the way women are being perceived. By doing this we get an understanding of how the author valued women in his/her texts.



Marxist view focuses on how social causes and poverty are being sidelined in the name of fame and power. Through this lens the reader is able to understand the importance of justice and how much it matters to stick to the true morals and ethics.

Psychoanalytic lens argues that the work represents the author’s own childhood manifestations and secret desires. It says that our unconscious mind gives rise to the desires and archetypes portrayed in the text. By reading the text through this lens, the reader is able to detect the repressed feelings of the author and understand how different actions are influenced by his/her past experience.

- Nayaelah, Viya, Karishma and Tanya

Academic analysis of The Great Gatsby

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14816-0/fitzgerald-and-hemingway/excerpt