Over the course of unit 2, we have explored The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald alongside 8 songs each by the musical artists Taylor Swift and Jay-Z. These artists were chosen for a whole host of reasons (including Jay-Z’s personal connection to the 2013 Gatsby film), but the primary one is that their music tends to explore the same basic themes as Fitzgerald’s novel: Love and Identity in the case of Taylor Swift; Money and Race in the case of Jay-Z. And just as our understanding of Gatsby’s themes deepens over the course of reading the novel and uncovering its secrets, these artists explore these themes in increasingly complex ways throughout their career as their lives and experiences change – the Taylor Swift who wrote “Our Song” could not have written “Blank Space,” and the Jay-Z who wrote “Can’t Knock the Hustle” could not have written “The Story of O.J.,” for example. Additionally, almost every song selected for this unit can be compared to a specific scene or character from Gatsby, and comparing the two can often lead to profound insights about the nature of these universal forces that shape our lives. We’ve already made many of these connections in class discussion, and you may have explored some yourself by way of your Weekly Observation essays. Your task in this culminating essay is to choose one artist (Taylor Swift or Jay-Z), choose one theme (Love, Identity, Money, or Race), and write a lengthy analysis comparing the way your chosen artist handles this theme to the way Gatsby handles it. You may find similarities or you may find differences, depending on your perspective and what you choose to focus on: for example, you might write an essay about how Gatsby handles race differently than the music of Jay-Z does, or perhaps how Gatsby’s handling of Identity is similar to the music of Taylor Swift. Regardless, your essay should be held together by a clear and specific thesis explaining what we can learn about this theme by exploring your chosen texts.
This is a bit of a complicated writing task, so here’s a breakdown of the process you’ll want to follow:
STEP ONE: Choose your musician!
– Taylor Swift
– Jay-Z
STEP TWO: Choose your theme!
– Love (option #1 if you chose Taylor Swift)
– Identity (option #2 if you chose Taylor Swift)
– Money (option #1 if you chose Jay-Z)
– Race (option #2 if you chose Jay-Z)
– (Note: if you would like to explore another theme not listed here and can make a persuasive argument for why it’s relevant in both Gatsby and your chosen artist’s music, you are free to do so.)
STEP THREE: Choose your songs!
– You will likely not have time or space to write about all eight songs by your chosen artist that we studied in class, so you should choose a selection of songs that you think pair well with one another as well as Gatsby. Three songs feels like a good number to me, but you are welcome to choose more or less if you fell as though you are saying enough about each one. Also: if you are familiar with songs by this artist not covered in class, you are welcome to bring those into your analysis as well. Just be mindful that the more songs you choose to write about, the longer your essay should be.
STEP FOUR: Choose your evidence from Gatsby!
– These instructions have so far really emphasized the musical aspect of this essay because that’s the part that’s unusual and complicated, but remember that you are also writing an essay about The Great Gatsby, and you should dedicate just as much (if not more) space in your essay to talking about that. It would be a good idea to spend a bit of planning time taking note of key scenes, characters, or details that will be relevant to talk about in your essay when exploring your chosen theme.
STEP FIVE: Write your thesis!
– This is a potentially difficult part of the process, but it’s the most important. DO NOT START WRITING YOUR ESSAY WITHOUT A THESIS IN MIND. A thesis for an essay like this should be your overall takeaway about your chosen theme based on all the thinking you’ve done about both Gatsby and your chosen musician/songs. A sentence stem you may consider using might be: “After studying both The Great Gatsby and the work of [INSERT MUSICIAN NAME HERE], an important truth about [INSERT THEME HERE] is revealed: [INSERT OVERARCHING THEME STATEMENT HERE].”
STEP SIX: Write your essay!
– Now it’s time for the really hard part: making your case, over the course of several paragraphs/pages. Just like with your last Final Interpretation essay, you’ll want to keep a few things in mind: (1) a surface-level comparison of plot similarities will not be acceptable, as you need to push beyond plot and into theme, (2) your chosen topic may benefit from citing some of your own research, depending on what angle you’d like to pursue, and (3) remember that you are not just writing about a single part of a single text; you are writing about the entirety of several complex texts (including “The Great American Novel”), so you will need to do the complexity of those texts justice here. As a result, this essay will need to be considerably longer than the writing you have done in this class thus far. This is not because you have some arbitrary word count, paragraph count, or page count to hit, but because there’s just no way to sufficiently explore both of these complex texts in a single page. Longer doesn’t necessarily mean better, but length is often necessary if you want to give yourself space to fully develop your ideas.
As is the case for every assignment of this class, the document you submit will need to end with a reflection on its own page, in which you explain what letter grade you think your essay deserves, taking into account the essays strengths and weaknesses (every piece of writing has both). The difference this time, however, is that this reflection isn’t merely to get you in the habit of thinking critically about your own work – it will be your opening argument in a negotiation about how this essay should be actually graded. Because this is a unit-culminating essay, I am not simply giving out zeros and 100s for effort, completion, and formatting. This essay will be graded for quality, and only the strongest submissions will be awarded As. Keep this in mind as you write your reflections: be honest, but also be persuasive in order to get the grade you think you deserve.
One more thing: this essay will go in the gradebook twice, once as a rough draft and once as a final draft. We will dedicate a week of class to workshopping rough drafts and revising them into final drafts. Both drafts will be graded for quality, but if you raise your grade between the rough draft and the final draft, the final draft grade will be retroactively applied to both.
The page you are looking at now is the place to submit your rough draft, which is has a HARD DEADLINE of Monday, December 13th at 11:59 PM.
Your final draft will be due on a different Canvas assignment page by midnight on Friday, which will also serve as the hard deadline for ALL Fall Semester work.
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