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SoSe 22: Echoes of the Jazz Age: Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald in 2022

Tobias Alexander Jochum

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The world in turmoil; a palpable shifting of paradigms. Technological innovations are reshaping the experience of space and time. A new stage of turbo capitalism has amassed an unprecedented concentration of wealth at the top, stretching thin the social contract in liberal democracies. Political polarization is reaching fever pitch: mobilizing around a perceived loss of inherent privilege, forces of white supremacy lash out violently. Entrenched gender roles and sexual mores evaporate into new liberties, while a culture war rages between voices of reason and progress and an invigorated reactionary right. A young generation is coming of age into a changed world. It is an anxious time of apocalyptic warnings. The days of decadence and carefree diversion seem numbered as economic depression and global calamity loom. The new twenties of today bear more than a passing resemblance to the Jazz Age that F. Scott Fitzgerald so memorably chronicled. The role of literature itself, on the other hand, has in the meantime changed dramatically. As we count the centennial of the full arrival of Anglo-American literary Modernism (The Wasteland and Ulysses headline the literary milestones published in 1922) this seminar revisits Fitzgerald's oeuvre, guided by the central question: In what way does Fitzgerald, an author tied to a particular era like few others, speak to our own time and predicaments today? The course will explore Fitzgerald's life and works in his own context first—against the social and cultural history of the interwar period—and then engage his novels and short fiction through a number of critical lenses and close readings, including Marxist and intersectional approaches (focussed on class, race and gender), ecocriticism and affect theory, along themes ranging from addiction and celebrity to masculinity and fascism. close