Critics Flashcards
Gatsby- Judith Fetterley
“Daisy’s failure of Gatsby is symbolic of the failure of America to live up to the expectations in the imagination of the men who discover it”
Gatsby- James E. Miller Jr. (Class)
“The Valley of Ashes represents the grey, dismal environment of the Wilsons and the life of the class to which they belong to”
Gatsby- James E. Miller Jr. ( Tragedy)
The Valley of Ashes “ become the primary backdrop against which the tragedy is played out”
Gatsby- Marius Bewley
“The Great Gatsby offers some of he severest and closest criticism of the American Dream that out literature can afford”
Grapes- Gerald Haslam (Society)
“Those born into poverty, no matter how gifted, have virtually no opportunity to rise in our society”
Grapes- Gerald Haslam (Tom)
“Tom Joad, who like so many of the characters, is a complex mixture of positive and negative traits, rather than a contrived hero
Grapes- Robert DeMott
“The giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving a piece of bread”
Grapes- Shockley
“The Joads are like the Israelites as “they too flee from oppression, wander through the wilderness of hardship, seeking their own promise land”
Grapes- Gladstone
“The fact that she is known only as ‘Ma’ and not a given first name reinforces her material image”
Mark Twain
“Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream, it is the foundation of it”
Judith Fetterley
“America is female, whereas, the dreamers are male”
Gatsby-Jack Farmer
Gatsby is “a ghost swaddled in the glamorous trappings of America in the roaring twenties”
Tocqueville
“Men will then be seen continually to change their tract in fear of missing the shortest cut to happiness”
