Wednesday, April 7th, 1999

Announcements:

Lecture notes:
Mass, Popular and Material Culture

• Production, Consumption, and Marketing
• Every culture creates objects that help them deal with the world
• Objects made by/ modified by a peoples/culture reflect their beliefs and values
• One can chart a change in culture by a change in the material culture
• Products are public signs of identity
• What we buy/consume can be used as a sign of what we think of ourselves and what we want others to think of us
• With mass marketing, new models of behavior can be marketed to people of different backgrounds generating resulting conformity based on middle class consumer values
• People express themselves through what they consume
• Pop culture shapes American culture
• Frederick Jackson Turner

- Americans have an optimistic view that we can always have more
- When the land of the frontier was ending, Americans turned to economics
- Physical frontier becomes economical frontier
- Instead of more land, there is more money
- Emphasis on success opposed to decency

• Nick

- Narrator, Perspective of mid-west in the city
- From the Middle way
- Working Class
- Moves to the city to make a fortune
- "I'm inclined to reserve all judgments"
- Gets us into places in the novel that we would not be allowed to get
- Has a sense of infinite hope, possibility
- Don't criticize other people because they might not know any better
• Tom

- inherited aristocracy
- Brutish
- identifies himself by his material objects
- Defines relationships as material relationships
- Racist
- Superiority
- Has some family values, which is odd because he has a mistress
• Myrtle

- Trying to fulfill, in her own way, self-improvement
- Leads a fantasy life with Tom
- Role playing
- Needs material objects
- Does not love her husband because he cannot buy her expensive things
- Relates to Benjamin Franklin's self improvement guide, making lists of what she needs, etc.
• Chapter II ~ Introduction

- Competing Ideas between the city and the frontier
- Submerged Pastoral
- Inverted view
- Images of the Farm are being under cut
- Fitzgerald calls up old values to reflect the city life
- There is a linkage between past values and these values today (Franklin)