"I am moved by fancies that are curled / Around these images, and cling": Photographic Narration and Creative Subjectivity in The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway wrote <italic>The Great Gatsby</italic> and <italic>The Sun Also Rises</italic> in an age marked by an onslaught of images, and particularly by the proliferation of the photograph. Modernity&rsquo;s preoccupation with the photographic medium raised urgent questions related to seeing and knowing, reality and representation. Photography&rsquo;s richness as a metaphor stems from its embodiment of such fraught philosophical and aesthetic tensions and its destabilization of modernity&rsquo;s binarial oppositions: objectivity and subjectivity, mimesis and poesis, technology and aesthetics, etc.. In this thesis, I locate &ldquo;photographic narration&rdquo; within my chosen texts and use it as an interpretive framework to analyze Nick Carraway&rsquo;s and Jake Barnes&rsquo; dynamic modes of vision. Photographic narration equips Nick and Jake to express and capitalize upon contradictory impulses jointly, and it positions them as empowered subjects who can envision their experiences multi-focally to meet their psychological needs. I also explore the ways in which pedagogical theory related to linguistic and spatial intelligence, multimodality, and visual literacy intersect with photographic narration, both in my chosen texts and in the contemporary language arts classroom.