This short video will help you decide what websites and sources you should or should not use in researching. It will help you decide what information to use from the web, and what sites you should not go to to get scholarly, peer reviewed articles.
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When deciding on a topic, it is helpful to just sit down and write out as much as you can about your topic. This is what i wrote when thinking about my next essay. Free writing does not have to have a structure or any citation. This is just for yourself, and it will help you to map out what you already know, what you might want to do your research on, and to find out if you have a clear thesis. As I found out after this writing, I have a couple direction I could take this particular essay. My next step is to choose a narrow thesis and start my research.
I want to write about The Great Gatsby and the modern version of it, Fight Club. Palahniuk wrote Fight Club in 1996, over 70 years after The Great Gatsby. He says it is his modern rendition of Gatsby. They both equally and oppositely show the corruption of wanting the American dream. It is almost as though Fight Club is the same story, for a different time. Where Gatsby needs to climb to social ladder and gain possessions to achieve his American Dream, Tylor needs to hit rock bottom and be stripped of all possessions, to the point of there is nothing left to lose, to achieve his American Dream. Both lead to chaos, and attempt to make order out of chaos. Both fail. Both do what ever means necessary to achieve their goals, and both end up shot as their dreams explode in their face. The social commentary in both books make them extremely contemporary and relevant to their specific decade.Fight Club demonstrates a characteristic of modernist literature in that what is traditionally expected of a person is put aside, here by Tyler Durden. Gatsby pushes aside traditional means and recreates himself.
Symbols and themes used persistently in Fight Club taken directly from Great Gatsby; eyes of God distantly watching, death at climax, stripping/acquiring possessions, gossip/rumors.
There is a theme, or motif, of rebirth in these books. Gatsby creates himself new, after he kills his old self. He makes his life from nothing. At the time it is a bit of a stigma to have created your own fortune because there is no reputation to accompany it. Gossip and rumors spread wildly about Gatsby and add to his infamy. Likewise, Tyler is also from an obscure and unknown past. Mainly because he is straight out of the unnamed character’s (Joe) imagination. Tyler is surrounded by rumors and gossip as well, which turns him into a legend. This helps him to build his empire where he ironically strips himself and his followers of their possessions and identity. Gatsby shows how accumulating possessions does not enlighten or fulfill anything in life, it corrupts. Fight Club shows that even in stripping yourself of everything, you cannot escape the world in which we live in.
