Teaching Gatsby, Reading "Greatness": Comparing Collective Memories of America's Past to Narrate the Nation in a Divided State

Kyle P. Smith

The concept of a literary canon has dominated the teaching of secondary English language arts (ELA) since the beginning of America's public school system. These books are centralized in many curricula, yet not without controversy. While some assert the texts hold high literary merit, others decry that they are ideologically entrapped within exclusive, hegemonic narratives forwarding cis-heterosexism, white supremacy, and the othering of historically minoritized voices. Through a comparative case study design, in this dissertation, I interrogate how three English educators and their students each read and respond to one of the United States's most taught novels, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In doing so, I compare and contrast how these classrooms, located within politically divergent regions of a divided Midwestern state, are responsive to their locales as they engage critical canon pedagogical practices in their learning. By attuning to the current sociopolitical moment, one wherein America's national narrative is centralizing under far-right ideologies and deeper marginalization of underrepresented and vulnerable communities, I interrogate how collective memory and ideological attachment shape the conditions for critique operationalized by students and educators. Within my work, I cast The Great Gatsby, an ever-present text in secondary English curriculum, as a mediating object – a prism through which students and educators refract the complexities and contentions of the present. Ultimately, in our era of increased curricular censorship and book banning, I examine how the texts that undergird the so-called "greatness" of the American literary tradition might be used to enact criticality in teaching and learning.

About Kyle P. Smith

Kyle P. Smith (he/him) is a PhD candidate in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan's Marsal Family School of Education. A former public school teacher from rural Kentucky, Kyle maintains a commitment to secondary English language arts by examining the promises and precarity of critical literacy instruction. With a particular emphasis on exploring the pedagogical possibilities of LGBTQ+ young adult literature to talk across differences, his work interrogates how race, religiosity, and nationhood are refracted through literary analysis and classroom conversation. His work has been published in journals such as Reading Research Quarterly, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, and English Education.