Gangster Fiction: The Gangster American Dream

О курсе

This five-week course examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) as a distinctive and provocative entry in the American gangster fiction tradition. This course asks students to consider how Gatsby inhabits and complicates the genre, offering a story in which the gangster is not simply a criminal protagonist but a symbol of the American Dream itself. Through close reading, literary analysis, and contextual discussion, learners will explore how Fitzgerald uses character, language, structure, and symbolism to depict ambition, identity, class, and the limits of self-invention in Jazz Age America. Learners will interact with The Great Gatsby as an enduring work of American fiction that uses the figure of the gangster as a lens through which to examine the hopes and failures of American life. Centered on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, the course situates the novel in its historical moment (notably, Prohibition and the Jazz Age) while examining the literary craft that has made it one of the most studied novels in the American canon. Students will investigate character complexity, poetic and vernacular language, symbolism, narrative structure, and the concept of the ineffable—those things that resist being put into words but that drive human longing. Designed for three distinct learning tracks—Academic/College Student, Book Club Leader, and Creative Writer/Artist—the course also addresses the role of AI and popular culture as tools for engaging with literature, encouraging students to bring their full selves to the text and to carry what they learn beyond the page.

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Dillon Gidcumb

Senior Learning Experience Designer