Finding purpose and politics in Gatsby at PCTELA18

It was very early and very dark when we began our journey to Harrisburg, PA, to present at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English annual conference, #PCTELA18. Audrey had been to the national affiliate meeting for NCTE, where leaders of all the affiliates gather and share ideas and resources, and met some of the dynamic PCTELA board members, and we were very excited to get to hear the amazing A.S. King speak, so we knew it would be worth the trip.

It sounded good at the time, but when we had to get up at 4am and drive through NJ and PA in the dark, we began to question why we were doing this! As always, we started to feel energized as we arrived at the conference and left feeling inspired and ready to take on the world (if a little tired). Isn’t that what’s so great about NCTE and the affiliates – how they harness and focus our energies and remind us of the amazing community of educators to which we belong.

We presented our latest incarnation of our work, entitled for this forum, Gatsby: 1925 or 2018?

We opened our presentation with our newest favorite tech tool, Mentimeter. We asked our audience the following: When you think of Gatsby, what words come to mind? Mentimeter did the rest, in real time; how awesome!

We chuckled over “overrated,” bemoaned the “green light” (Audrey’s bugaboo), and noted the presence of “economic inequality,” “privilege,” and “wealth.”

From there, and invoking the conference theme, “The Stories of Our Lives,” we launched into our discussion of how The Great Gatsby, a text written and set in the 1920s and taught regularly in many, many English classrooms, can be taught as a topical, relevant text that interrogates fundamental issues -- past, present, and future -- about our culture and beliefs. We explored key issues in Gatsby – white supremacy and nationalism, the difficulties of economic mobility, economic inequality, anti-Semitism, and the social psychology of privilege and entitlement – and tried to unpack how to use this canonical text to create space for difficult, critical conversations.

For us, it was fascinating to talk pedagogy with PCTELA members who self-identified as people teaching in the big red state of PA. For both of us, teaching in urban Northern New Jersey, the politics are enormously different. The energy and engagement in the room was palpable; several people interjected mid-session with questions and comments (a presenter’s greatest delight!). 

We thought some of the concerns our audience raised and our views on them worth sharing, as we know that teachers across the country, particularly in the redder pockets of our nation, are grappling with how to navigate a tricky political landscape while still ensuring that our classrooms are spaces for:

1. critical thinking about big issues that matter (and not just the green light!);

2. students to think through and contextualize the drama of our particular moment through the context of literature;

3. difficult conversations.

For example, one person at PCTELA asked us whether we were worried about injecting politics into the classroom when, for example, we focus on the white nationalism and economic inequality in Gatsby. Another asked whether we include opposing viewpoints. Still another asked about whether we worried that students would just give us back what we want to hear. These are legitimate, challenging concerns that are worth careful consideration.

Our strategy is two-fold.

First, we try to think about our work as focused on extracting the politics out of the text(s), rather than injecting our politics. Of course, we focus on things we care about. And so our extraction, our focus, is of necessity going to change based on time and place. Trump, Kavanaugh, Roseanne (some of the connections that have recently caught our attention) produce our interest in how the text navigates white nationalism, fear of non-white immigrants, white male privilege, and the anger and entitlement of those in positions of power.

Reading Gatsby in 2018 is and should be different from reading Gatsby in 1950. Isn’t that, after all, the beauty of literature? Audrey likes to think that if anything makes a text worthy of canonical status, it is that text’s capacity to generate conversation and merit scrutiny in different times and places. (But then again, that may be a function of the reader and an altogether different conversation.) 

That said, no one in 2018 can underestimate the trepidation teachers (and students too) feel about these difficult conversations. Yet, as one of our PCTELA audience members asserted, based on his experience teaching at a wealthy, all-male private school with what he described as a mostly Republican student body, young people are eager to talk about these things. If we open the door and ground our discussion in Gatsby and companion texts like excerpts from Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, (inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Goddard), or social psychologist Paul Piff’s “Does Money Make You Mean,” an engaging TED Talk about behavioral experiments involving games of monopoly, driving habits, and more, we create space for dialogue in our classroom. 

We don’t have to be explicit in discussing Trump or Kavanaugh; for a variety of reasons, we may not be comfortable doing so. But we can frame our discussions of Gatsby and extract the politics from Fitzgerald’s text, so that students have the space and language to think and talk about the big issues that they are seeing all around them. That’s our hope based on our experience, albeit in a very different environment.

After our talk, we had the amazing privilege to hear contemporary young adult author A.S. King address PCTELA. Wow! Her remarks about the importance of young adult literature resonated so strongly with us. King talked about how she couldn’t connect with the four novels (!) she was assigned in the entirety of her high school experience. The Scarlett Letter, she noted, seemed to contain all sorts of issues that should have been meaningful to her, but the Puritans, she admitted, “were a real buzz-kill.” And so she skipped Hawthorne.

S.E. Hinton was another story, for King. (And later, unaccountably, The Satanic Verses.)

Her broader point was that contemporary young adult literature has such an important place in our curriculum, particularly as it keeps young readers reading. King noted sardonically those gatekeepers who say that they don’t believe in contemporary young adult literature and retorted, “it’s not like fairies; it exists.” Indeed. And the passion that so many young readers have for this literature only serves to underscore the importance of our finding ways to make ALL the texts we teach meaningful, relevant, and purposeful for our students. 

Our work is cut out for us, especially for those who teach in schools where the curriculum is still dominated by mostly canonical and somewhat inaccessible texts, like Gatsby. But as we tried to show in our presentation, it is precisely Gatsby’s staid canonicity that makes it so full of insurgent and subversive possibilities. This is the work we love, and that so many English teachers do so creatively, ambitiously, and thoughtfully.

So, all in all, an inspiring and impressive PCTELA conference. We left invigorated, and on the way home stopped in Hershey for a tour of Chocolate World (Susan’s first time). Sweet!

The Atlantic: How Gatsby explains Trump

If you have been following our work on Gatsby, you know we are interested in the ways in which Fitzgerald’s novel is eerily resonant with many of the issues we are facing at this moment: anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and general xenophobia, economic inequality, white nationalist anxiety, and more. Time and again we are intrigued and amazed at the ways in which Fitzgerald’s 1925 text anticipates and reflects the issues of our current historical moment (which may be to say that these issues continue to appear and reappear across time).

In any case, we were thrilled to read Rosa Inocencio Smith’s recent, brilliant piece in The Atlantic, which addresses many of the issues with which we have been grappling. In “How The Great Gatsby Explains Trump,” Smith reads the novel as “a surprisingly apt primer on the [current] president of the United States.”

In her accessible and engagingly written (and highly teachable) article, Smith explores both the superficial and deep connections between Tom Buchanan and Trump and argues that Gatsby, as a story about power under threat, can be read as a “warning” of how power “can render truth irrelevant.”

As Smith details, all the main characters in Gatsby, not just Tom, use their wealth and power to assert a kind of deceitful privilege in the world. Jordan cheats at golf. Nick buys a financial practice to start a new life, leaving the Midwest and a “tangle” of a relationship behind. Daisy, with her “voice full of money,” rarely, as Smith notes, “says anything she means.” As Nick notes, it’s almost as if Daisy and Tom belong to a “distinguished secret society,” in which power, not truth, is the real currency.

For Smith, the key warning in Gatsby is not simply Tom’s “carelessness about truth and consequences,” but the ways in which that carelessness infects and is mirrored in so many of the other characters in the novel. Tom, then, like Trump, exposes the “gaps in America’s ideal of itself – the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities.” The disconnect in Gatsby between truth and power is underscored in the injustice of the novel’s closing: Nick can only shake Tom’s hand and muse that “There was nothing I could say except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”

Closely linked to Smith’s discussion of power and privilege in Gatsby and Trump is a fascinating discussion by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, “The Angry White Male Caucus.” Krugman argues that Trump’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s white male anger represents a “sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly-privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change.” Doesn’t this toxic mix of privilege and anger also sound like Tom, a man of immense wealth who is unaccountably worried about the colored races taking over the world and who, in the course of the novel, comes to face his worst nightmare when he discovers that Mr. Nobody from Nowhere is sleeping with his wife?

Krugman places Kavanaugh’s (and Trump’s white male anger) squarely in the context of privilege, arguing that both men exemplify the “hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including behavior toward women.” Krugman suggests that that this kind of privilege is in fact under siege in the increasingly diverse United States and that “nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially … the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”

Of course, Gatsby makes clear that Tom is not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. Gatsby, in the end, does not represent any threat to Tom; even the prize, Daisy, returns to her rightful position with Mr. Somebody. The status quo is maintained, albeit unsettlingly, within Gatsby, although the novel registers both the threat to and the rage of its Trumpian Tom.

Those of us who teach in places where candid and open discussion of the current political scene is possible are lucky to be able to teach Gatsby in a moment where its relevance can infuse our teaching with the kind of purpose that is so critical in the classroom. The connections between Gatsby and Trump underscore for us and our students why this text matters and how it enables critically important conversations. Smith’s article, for example, illustrates exactly how pertinent and revealing careful literary analysis can be beyond the English classroom.

For those of us for whom such explicit discussions would be more dangerous (and we know that ours is a difficult moment for academic freedom), it is worth remembering the vital work of opening up space in the classroom for conversations vis-à-vis the very traditional and canonical Gatsby about power, truth, privilege and xenophobia. Even when we don’t link these issues explicitly with Trump or Kavanaugh as part of our classroom conversations, our thoughtful attention to the issues of power and its abuses in Gatsby can serve as a catalyst, provoking and allowing students to make their own connections in their writing or in their private conversations outside the classroom.

And while it may seem risky to engage in such difficult discussions in our classrooms, as we discussed with the dedicated teachers we met at the NJCTE Fall Conference last weekend, it is far scarier to allow our students to leave our classrooms without having the opportunity to learn how to engage in the kinds of  thoughtful, critical conversations that our democracy hinges upon. If you share the same concerns and happen to be in Pennsylvania on October 19, please join us at PCTELA to continue this conversation.