The goal of this course is to examine one of the essential texts of Asheville School’s American Studies curriculum, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The course will evaluate Fitzgerald’s examination of the American Dream, a novel written on the heels of the 1918 pandemic and World War I, when the world seemed in riot, and to aid our reading we will supplement the novel with Greil Marcus’s Under the Red White and Blue: Patriotism, Disenchantment and the Stubborn Myth of the Great Gatsby.
Texts will include:
- Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Scribner Classic)
- Greil Marcus, Under the Red White and Blue (Yale)
This course will meet via Zoom for four to five sessions, beginning the week of February 21 and ending no later than the week of March 21. Classes will run approximately 75 minutes, depending on the material and will meet Thursday (and Wednesday, if enrollment requires two sections) evenings from 7:00 p.m. to roughly 8:15 p.m., depending on the session.
If interested, please contact Jay Bonner via email ([email protected]) by Friday, February 11. Final determination of the schedule will be sent to those interested by February 15—unless demands necessitates more than two evenings of classes, in which case we will contact you by February 14 asking for your evening preference(s). The final schedule, in this event, would be emailed February 16.
This course is offered free of charge; your only expense is your time commitment and the purchase of the necessary reading materials. Thornwell Books, a bookstore in Morganton, North Carolina, operated by past parent Jean VanNoppen (PP ’07, ’08, ’11, ’12) and Ellen VanNoppen ’08, would be happy to aid your purchase of the books. Please feel free to contact Thornwell Books at (828) 434-1122 for a copy of the books or use the store’s online portal.