The paper is to produce an original and rewarding analysis of the significance of a textual echo in The Great Gatsby. Your task is to analyze how Fitzgerald uses the textual echo to develop an illuminating claim or insight, or thesis, about a specific keyword—a topic, problem, or question—or intersection of keywords. Your analysis should be 600-700 words. A quick reminder: A textual echo is a pair or series of passages, moments, or scenes that the author invites us to connect. An echo might feature a repeated word or phrase, but more often it features a repeated image, action, plot point, setting, or idea. By inviting us to compare and contrast these passages, moments, or scenes, textual echoes help us think about the characters and the story in fresh ways, and they point us to topics and questions the author wants us to think about. Textual echoes gain their meaning and emotional force not just from the similarities between the passages, moments, or scenes but also, as importantly, from the differences. A keyword is a topic, problem, or question with which the text is preoccupied. You can think of it as an idea that the author wants to say or show something about. Every literary text invites us to think about many keywords. A keyword is not usually a word that appears in the text. A keyword can be a phrase (e.g., “How far do our moral responsibilities extend toward strangers?”). What to do: Choose one (1) of the textual echoes in The Great Gatsby listed below, and analyze how Fitzgerald uses it to develop an interesting claim or insight about a specific keyword (or intersection of keywords). To do this, think carefully about the following questions: • How do the paired passages constitute a textual echo? What textual data (e.g., language, imagery, action, setting, context) suggests that these passages, moments, or scenes are connected, and that Fitzgerald invites us to think of them in connection with each other? • What keyword or intersection of keywords does this echo evoke or call our attention to? It can be difficult to produce an illuminating and original echo analysis that focuses on an obvious keyword (like “the American Dream”). For this reason, home in on a keyword, or an intersection of keywords, that was not discussed at length in lecture. Discerning fresh keywords related to your textual echo requires interpretive and conceptual work. Examples of non-obvious keywords in The Great Gatsby include chance, determinism, flesh, gender, the Midwest, to name just a few. One way to achieve analytical originality is to explore the intersection of two seemingly remote keywords (for example, gender + flesh or chance + corruption). • What is Fitzgerald saying or showing about the keyword (or intersection of keywords) by staging this echo the way he does? How does comparing these passages, moments, or scenes—and thinking about the movement from one to the next in the novel—serve to illuminate what Fitzgerald is saying or showing about the keyword or keyword intersection? Your answer to this question will be your thesis (see below). This paper is exploratory in the sense that its purpose is to help you to come up with a fresh thesis (defined below). Your fresh thesis should emerge from your textual analysis, not the other way around. Your fresh thesis should identify what Fitzgerald is saying or showing about the keyword (or intersection of keywords) and how the staging of the textual echo conveys this. Your thesis should be 1-3 sentences. Underline this thesis. Your thesis may appear anywhere in your analysis (unlike in a formal essay, where it always appears in the first paragraph).
