'The Great Gatsby'

Baz Luhrmann's film of The Great Gatsby looks set to entertain, but it's Fitzgerald's life story that has to be seen to be believed.

Novel vision … (from left) Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire in the Great Gatsby. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd

You can't open a newspaper these days without finding someone writing about F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I'm not complaining. Gatsby is the novel – almost a prose poem – I reread every year, and I never tire of its backstory. Although everything I've seen about Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming film fills me with anxiety, I'll be among the first to go and see it. Cinema and Fitzgerald could make an ideal marriage. Why shouldn't a movie director re-imagine 1920s West Egg and give us his reinterpretation of what Fitzgerald christened "The Jazz Age"? It can't, or won't, be the novel, but it might capture something of the madness in which Fitzgerald found himself.

The writer was great that way. A party animal with a line in champagne zingers; endlessly quotable; completely at one with the zeitgeist; a literary artist whose obiter dicta became the soundtrack of his times. For instance: "There are no second acts in American lives." And: "All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath." And perhaps most famous of all, the last line of The Great Gatsby: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

We're going to read a lot of Fitzgerald quotations these next few weeks. Fitzgerald's admirers will be delighted that he is getting some long overdue recognition, but sad, too, perhaps. When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

But perhaps Fitzgerald's life and work is compelling precisely because it answers, in an archetypal way, what we, the reading public, expect the career of a genius to look like. Consider the bare bones of his story. Comfortable beginnings in St Paul, Minnesota, the heart of the midwest. His mother reports, appropriately, that the boy's first word was "up". First stirrings of the writer's ambition. He moves into the fast track of his society, pursuing literary goals, and goes to Princeton University. Drops out; falls in love and is rejected; writes a novel that's turned down; goes to the battlefields of France; returns to the USA with no prospects. Then ... 1919-1920: his annus mirabilis. Revises his unpublished work. This Side of Paradise is accepted by Scribner, and is published to huge acclaim. Now his sweetheart, Zelda Sayre, agrees to marriage.

Scott and Zelda lead rock star lives in the Manhattan of the 1920s. Burning with ambition for his art, Fitzgerald completes a book whose many rejected titles include Trimalchio in West Egg, the novel the world knows as The Great Gatsby. There's an added myth about its publication: Gatsby did not flop, as is often claimed; it just didn't do as well as had been hoped. TS Eliot, for one, wrote: "It seems to me to be the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James." It was only in comparison with Fitzgerald's astounding debut that it seemed to fail.

Thereafter, Fitzgerald went into a long tunnel of decline, a decade he later described in a controversial sequence of Esquire articles as "The Crack-Up", a rare text recently republished by Capuchin Classics. In search of that elusive "second act", he moved to Hollywood, published Tender Is the Night, a novel that baffled the critics, and began his final unfinished masterpiece, The Last Tycoon. Then dies, aged 44; is forgotten, but lives on through Gatsby. It's a literary life for the ages.

In outline, the F Scott Fitzgerald story is the movie you might want to see. Baz Luhrmann's version will be entertaining. It won't be Gatsby, the novel. But never mind. Many new readers will be inspired to discover the miracle of Fitzgerald's prose, and the strange subtlety of his vision. In 1925, Gatsby was ahead of its time, and almost too prescient. Now, it seems perfectly in harmony with the deepest and darkest chords in American life. That's why, for some, including this writer, it remains the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

Robert Mc Crum -The Guardian, UK

Premiere in Argentina: 16th May- La Plata: Cinema La Plata

http://www.guardian.co.uk

When flappers ruled the Earth

The wild women of 1920s dance didn't just get everyone doing the Charleston and the Grizzly Bear. Stars like Josephine Baker and Tallulah Bankhead also played a pivotal role in women's emancipation

The Nefertiti of now' ... Josephine Baker at the Casino of Paris in 1939. Photograph: Lipnitzki/Roger Viollet/Getty.

In 1908, wearing little more than a jewelled breastplate and a transparent skirt, the Canadian dancer Maud Allan stormed the fortress of British proprieties with her solo work, The Vision of Salomé. Allan danced an audacious choreography of desire, her body "swaying like a witch, twisting like a snake, and panting with [a hypnotic] passion", according to one dazed viewer. But while several theatres outside London barred Allan's performance as indecent, to her legions of women admirers, she was an inspiration. Margot Asquith, wife of the Liberal PM, was among those who saw Allan's dancing as a liberating expression of female sexuality.The early decades of the 20th century were an exhilarating battleground for women, with key gains made in political and legal reform. But women were also testing out another arena of emancipation: their bodies. As fashions grew simpler and skirts rose higher, reaching knee-length by the late 1920s, women found new physical freedoms – or, at least, those with sufficient money and time to take advantage of them.

In contrast to their bustled, draped and corseted grandmothers, they could feel the sun and wind on their limbs; they could run, stride and ride a bicycle with ease. They could also dance – and it's surely no coincidence that this was an era obsessed with dancing. From the barefoot ecstasies of Isadora Duncan, whosefree, expressive dancing struck a blow against the corseted rigours of classical ballet, to the collective "jazzing" of the 1920s, dance came to play a surprisingly emblematic role in the story of women's liberation.

The impact of Allan's Salomé spread far beyond theatre. To one rightwing politician, Noel Pemberton Billing, its eroticism was nothing less than an incitement to female depravity, specifically lesbianism. A decade later, with Britain at war, Billing published an article in his magazine Vigilante, accusing Allan of being key to a perniciously widespread "cult of the clitoris", and symptomatic of the unpatriotic decadence that was undermining the upper echelons of British society.

Even if Allan wasn't driving women to Sapphic wickedness, she was, in the words of another commentator, "promoting a dangerous tendency to dancing". And it wasn't just on the stage, but on the dancefloor, too, that women were displaying an alarming lack of modesty, with the social dances that began spreading through the west just before the first world war. Driven by the rhythms of American ragtime, the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear triggered a riotous deviation from the formality of the ballroom.

These encouraged dancers to kick up their feet, rock crazily from side to side and lock their swaying pelvises together. In 1914, the Vatican felt compelled to issue a formal denunciation of their suggestive, animalistic moves. To the young and very aristocratic British socialite Lady Diana Manners, these ragtime dances were part of a new "budding freedom", a sign that "Victorianism" had finally lost its grip.

Nightclubs had begun to appear in London in 1912 and, whenever Manners was able to evade her chaperones, these dark and crowded basements promised a cocktail of illicit thrills: smoking cigarettes, wearing lipstick, drinking Pink Ladies – and dancing. Her own expertise on the floor had been fuelled by a year of formal training in ballet and Russian folk dance. The physical poise she acquired wasn't just unusual for a woman of her class, though; it also provided a necessary boost to her confidence after the war, when she further flouted tradition by embarking on an acting career. Not only did this take her to Broadway, it also allowed her to support her husband, Duff Cooper, through his first years as a politician.

In the 1920s, ragtime was superseded by the wayward jangle and bounce of the Charleston and by the pert, buttock-flourishing naughtiness of the Black Bottom. Zelda Fitzgerald, famously the inspiration for her husband F Scott's fictional flapper heroines, was also a wicked exponent of the decade's jazz dances. The celebrity myths that accumulated around the Fitzgeralds were fed by stories of Zelda lifting her skirts high above her waist to emphasis the sway of her hips – and the flash of what Ernest Hemingway was pleased to call her "long nigger legs".

If dances were getting wilder, so too were morals. Between 1914 and 1929, the divorce rate doubled in the US and surveys reported that premarital sex was rising even faster. The promiscuity of young women caused alarm, particularly in Britain where, after the carnage of the war, it was estimated that only one in 10 were likely to find a husband and settle down to marriage and motherhood. As early as 1919, sympathy for their plight ebbed as the press began to speculate about the kinds of selfish, destabilising pleasures these single young women might be indulging in. The Daily Mail warned that the number of "superfluous" females could be a "disaster to the human race".

Dancing continued to be a lightning rod for public concern. In 1923, when Tallulah Bankhead came to London to advance her acting career, it wasn't just the delicious huskiness of her Alabama accent or the fizz of her personality that clinched her success. It was the topicality of the play in which she made her debut. The Dancers, written by Gerald du Maurier and Viola Tree, dramatised the arguments for and against liberated 1920s flappers through the stories of two very different dance-mad women. Bankhead's character Maxie was a professional cabaret artist whose dancing symbolised her independence; she earned her own money, and made her own way in the world. Her opposite number Audry, however, was a socialite whose addiction to dancing led only to a neurotic netherworld of nightclubs, cocktails and sex.

Fizz ... Tallulah Bankhead in 1925. Photograph: Alamy

The moral chaos of Audry's world was captured in a picture painted by the Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter in 1926. Titled, starkly, The Breakdown, it showed a naked flapper dancing the Charleston to the accompaniment of a jazz saxophonist. The latter was seated astride a fallen statue of Minerva, goddess of wisdom; the fact that he was also black contributed to the public furore that got Souter's painting forcibly removed from the walls of the Royal Academy in London.

Race was another taboo being broken, as the era saw a mass emigration of black American musicians and dancers into the major cities of Europe.Ada "Bricktop" Smith, a cabaret singer from West Virginia, became doyenne of the Paris nightclubs, giving Charleston lessons to everyone from the writer and heiress Nancy Cunard to the Prince of Wales. And when a skinny chorus girl from St Louis called Josephine Baker was shipped over to Paris in 1925 to perform in the fashionable Revue Nègre, her subversively inventive versions of jazz dance were hailed by artists and intellectuals as genius. Picasso called her the "Nefertiti of now" – and such was the impact of her dancing that she became elevated to an aesthetic ideal.

Having endured racial abuse and discrimination back home, Baker was now advertising beauty products that allowed white women to mimic her own glossy cropped hair, her burnished skin and supple silhouette. It was an astonishing turnaround for her. But it also demonstrated the power that the symbols of the jazz age – its clothes, music and dancing – had to cut across social barriers.

Alive and kicking ... a Charleston competition at the Parody Club, New York in 1926. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty

There is, of course, a less benign story to tell about the degree to which these symbols became commodified by the new billion-dollar advertising, fashion and beauty industries, and about the pressures they imposed. Young flappers may have thrown off the tyranny of the corset, but they discovered the new tyranny of dieting. A schoolgirl in Chicago tried to gas herself because her parents wouldn't let her bob her hair or shorten her skirts along with her classmates.

But to the American writer Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, the flapper represented a new spirit of emancipation. If women were to follow their "inner compulsion to be individuals", they had to throw off their shackling inheritance of obedience, whether to the puritanical tenets of old-schoolfeminism or to the sentimentalised duties of marriage and motherhood. It wasn't hardcore politics but, on the dancefloor at least, these women of the 1920s embodied Bromley's views. As they shimmied their shoulders and swivelled their hips, they were released into a brief but deeply subversive world – a world of freedom.

• More on this story

• 
  Josephine Baker and the wild women of 1920s dance – in pictures
  Flappers angered the Vatican and stood accused of starting 'the cult of the clitoris' in Britain. But they also played a huge role in the emancipation of women

Flappers: Women of a Dangerous Generation

1. by Judith Mackrell

http://www.guardian.co.uk

War Poets

World War I poets in England 

For the first time, a substantial number of important English poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross characterised the English "war poets" as a subgroup of the Georgian Poetry writers. Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One of the wartime anthologies was The Muse in Arms, published in 1917. Several anthologies were also published in the years after the war had ended. In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in Poet's Corner commemorating 16 poets of the Great War: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.

Interesting links: http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/firstWWarpoets.html

http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/warpoets_knew.htm

http://lenguaycultura2isfd97.blogspot.com.ar/2011/05/world-war-i-and-art.html

Log in to ecaths to get a copy of the poems and short stories we`ll study 

Welcome to Language & Culture II 2013!!!

Hello, Dear Students. This is the blog of our subject. This means will be used for complementing, sharing work and it`s our path to the subject's virtual platform called ecaths. 

My piece of advice is to check this blog and the platform on (at least) a weekly basis, as you will be assessed for participating.

Here goes link to  2013 syllabus:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B89-Hv57WDTqXzdGOHpNTmItMDQ/edit?usp=sharing

And this is an essay on High and Low cultures for the first classes:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qovvskzWMA4R4ff-9cSejd72gDMvVjs6O5ckBzKihic/edit?usp=sharing