The "Great" Gatsby?: Film Adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's American Classic

The "Great" Gatsby?: Film Adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald's American Classic

There have been various changes in the English department curriculum in the universities in Korea. Along with greater number of language courses, "culture" courses are being increasingly introduced to English literature majors, with some schools forming cultural studies programs within the English department. As part of the newly introduced culture courses, courses on film, which propose to examine film and literature together such as "Literature and Film/Film Theory," are being offered in the English department. In this paper, I consider the possibilities of film related courses in the English literature department. I argue that through comparative readings of literary works and their film adaptations, literature and film courses can encourage students to become close readers of both literature and film. I consider F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as an example here. Fitzgerald's novel is one of the most frequently and widely introduced texts in American literature and general literature courses. Despite its popularity however, many readers have difficulty pinpointing the theme of the novel, the meaning of the title, and the specific links to be made with the American Dream. Worth noting here is that the novel is narrated through a narrator, Nick Carraway, and Nick significantly creates and writes Gatsby through his romanticism. Readers are thus encouraged to reserve judgement on Gatsby, despite the actual, shady details of his life. As such, in this paper, I consider the difficulties of adapting into a film a novel with not only strong narratorial intervention, but one in which the narrator's intervention is central to the novel's theme and plot. I perform a comparative reading of two film adaptations of The Great Gatsby-one produced by Jack Clayton(974) and one by Robert Markowitz(2001)-and read the two texts with Fitzgerald's novel.