June 18 – Guest Lecture “Jazzed Up for the Party: The Great Gatsby at 100” 🗓

The mythology surrounding F. Scott Fitzgerald tends to eclipse his fierce devotion to his craft, a commitment animated by many sources, including music. The centennial of what many consider his greatest work, The Great Gatsby, provides ripe opportunity to reconsider our assumptions about it, along with Fitzgerald’s musical sources that are often obscured by the misleading designation of him as “America’s patron saint of the Jazz Age.” Fitzgerald knew very little about Jazz, but readers nevertheless want to read Gatsby as the author’s prose incarnation of it. This talk considers the connections, both viable and far-fetched, between the novel and the musical tropes that inspired it.

Nicole J. Camastra holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and serves as Director of the Signature Scholars Research Program at The O’Neal School in North Carolina. She is currently living in Oslo, Norway as a Fulbright Roving Scholar in American Studies and is the author of several essays on American literature. Her recent monograph, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the Muse of Romantic Music, was published by McFarland Press in 2023.

You can download the poster for the event here.