Ethnicity_in_Gatsby外文翻译.doc

Title: Desires second act: race and The Great Gatsbys cynical Americanism Author(s): Benjamin Schreier Source: Twentieth Century Literature. 53.2 (Summer 2007): p153. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Bookmark: Bookmark this Document I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives. --Fitzgerald, My Lost City (31) Few books have suffered Americanisms presumptions more unremittingly than has The Great Gatsby. This has again become apparent in the recent outpouring of work that draws attention to dynamics of racialization in the novel--to how Fitzgeralds book engages discourses that render racial and ethnic difference recognizable, including how certain characters are made to bear distinguishing racial or ethnic markers. By highlighting the novels interest in race and its role in the development of discourses that continue to administer the recognition of race and ethnicity in America, this new criticism--most appearing in the last 10 years or so--purports to rescue The Great Gatsby from the sentimental attractions of a universalized, imperial American identity. Like the scholarship it claims to challenge, however, this new criticism reveals the enduring hold of the Americanist romance and its confidence that the novel offers a straightforward description of something called America or American identity. In its attention to representations of raced difference in the novel, much of this new work--as represented by such critics as Michaels, Goldsmith, Thompson, Washington, and Nies--is enabled by an assumption that practices and signs already bear racial meaning. This scholarship thus often ends up reifying a variety of presumably characteristic raced American identities in place of a presumably characteristic unraced (if surreptitiously white) one, reinforcing the very formations whose genealogy it purportedly seeks to unearth. Thus this essentially statist inquiry into American literature and culture presumes, as it