Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms of Capital” in Fitzgerald’s Gatsby and Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us
Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, and social capital are distributed amongst identity groups of citizens, focusing on its favorable distribution to white upper-class men. Interesting, too, is the way in which these texts relate with one another and evolve over time. As Fitzgerald reaffirms boundary rights to white upper-class social capital to longstanding wealthy white males, Watts celebrates the survival of black individuals through the hard-earned persistence of human connection. Ultimately, as Gatsby fails to repeat the past, Watts succeeds in rewriting it.
capitalism, race, class, feminism, feminist, racial, African American Studies, American Literature, American Politics, American Popular Culture, American Studies, Behavioral Economics, English Language and Literature, Gender and Sexuality, Income Distribution, Inequality and Stratification, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies, Literature in English, North America, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority, Modern Literature, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Politics and Social Change, Race and Ethnicity, Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance, Social Psychology and Interaction, Sociology of Culture, Women's Studies, Work, Economy and Organizations
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