Living in a Material World: Men & Women in
The Great Gatsby and Bright Lights, Big City

This work examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City as novels of social critique. Sections I and II (Introduction and Critical Reputations) provide a brief initiation into the topic and argue that academic critics have radically failed to appreciate McInerney's work as an object of literary study. Section III (Economic Culture in Modern Boom Times) places these novels within the historical context of modernity / post-modernity to reveal how Fitzgerald and McInerney construct the subjectivities of their male characters as products damaged by capitalist consumer society. Section IV (Sexual Culture in Modern Boom Times) analyzes the negative impact of such subjectivities on heterosexual romantic relationships divided along traditional gender lines. Section V (Loving in a Material World) concludes the study with a summary of these authors' critiques and their potential remedies.

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