“Gatsby” ’s mid-century rise to required reading was not just an issue of historical or political relevance. It was also a matter of method. Education scholars often narrate the development of high-school-English pedagogy as a clash between two competing schools of thought. On one side is the “student-centered” approach typified by the education professor Louise M. Rosenblatt and her 1938 book, “Literature as Exploration,” which emphasized the resonances between the work and each reader’s individual experience. On the other is a “text-centered” approach known as New Criticism, associated with the literary critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and their textbook “Understanding Fiction.”
Brooks and Warren’s mode of reading fundamentally transformed the study of literature at high schools and universities alike. Rather than encourage students to make meaningful connections between the lives of fictional characters and their own, the New Critics taught them to search for structure, symbolism, and theme. This changed not only how students were asked to read but what books they were assigned. A symbol-laden novel like “Gatsby” offered an ideal opportunity for teen-age readers to practice the New Critics’ signature techniques. (That the book also came in at less than two hundred pages didn’t hurt.) As much as Fitzgerald’s tale of booze and reckless driving captured the nineteen-twenties, it was also the perfect vehicle for the critical and pedagogical fashions of the mid-century.
The 1966 CliffsNotes testifies to New Criticism’s growing prominence in the high-school classroom. The “valley of ashes,” the “eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg,” and, yes, “the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock” become newly important, rich symbols “invested with meanings that go beyond the concerns of plot and characterization, standing for the main ideas of the novel and . . . a general criticism of American culture.” Perhaps this is how you, too, were taught to read the book, culminating in a five-paragraph essay on the significance of the green light or Gatsby’s many-colored shirts.
The New Critics’ approach to understanding fiction has dominated the secondary-school English curriculum for decades. Still, what education scholars have called “the hegemony of New Criticism” is not absolute. As one educator lamented, in a 1968 issue of English Journal, “We are teachers of English, not puzzle solvers.” Many teachers continue to favor Rosenblatt’s approach, and seek to show how a novel about being borne back ceaselessly into the past has something to say about the present.
