Reimagining The Great Gatsby: The Roaring Twenties in Popular Culture

Catalog description

This course bridges texts and media from the 1920s to historical fiction and films set in the 1920s as a means to gather historiography of how it is remembered and marketed through images of glitzy flapper gowns, new dance crazes, prohibition, and sexual promiscuity in the US. Similarly, we will also critically engage with how it is contextualized and conveyed in the present moment as a period for self-reinvention and unprecedented social change, where queer and raced subjects can thrive despite harrowing circumstances. Many of the readings, movies, and other media on the syllabus are historical fiction, intended to encourage students to think critically about the representation of this period alongside our present. This course is an exploration of historical fiction and period dramas that serve as a pastiche of 1920s style and aesthetics and a consideration of the many paradoxes these explorations of the past produce.