讲座题目：梦想变成噩梦

讲座人：Conrad Shumaker 教授

主持人：李伟 副教授

讲座时间：14:30--16:30

讲座日期：2018年6月6日（星期三）

地点：新校区立心楼426

主办单位：社科处、外国语学院

Title: The Dream Turns to Nightmare

Lecturer: Prof. Conrad Shumaker

Host: Associate Prof. LI Wei

Time: 14:30--16:30

Date: 2018-06-06

Venue: Room 426, Lixin Building, Gaoxin Campus

Hosted by: Dept.of Social Science and College of Foreign Languages

主讲人简介:

Conrad Shumaker教授于1982年在加州大学洛杉矶分校获得博士学位，专业为美国文学。曾任教于亚利桑拉大学和加州大学洛杉矶分校，目前为中阿肯色大学教授、英文系系主任，美国大学教授协会会员、美国印第安文学研究协会会员、西部文学协会会员。2008年在纽约Perter Lang出版社出版专著Southwestern American Indian Literature in the Classroom and Beyond。发表学术论文数十篇，创作诗歌10余首，并出版有个人诗集1本。

讲座摘要：

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby: The Dream Turns to Nightmare

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is, like Benjamin Franklin, a self-made man. Having fallen in love with Daisy Buchanan, who comes from a wealthy family, young James Gatz decides that he will create himself anew with wealth. Like Colonel Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables, Gatsby gains his wealth in dishonest ways, then acquires a mansion that represents his status and will, he believes, accomplish his dream by getting Daisy to see his accomplishments as the sign of his worthiness and win her away from her rich but brutish husband. But in Fitzgerald’s portrait, the wealthy characters, including Daisy, are vacuous and carelessly destructive, leaving behind them a “holocaust” of broken lives. For Fitzgerald’s narrator, the American Dream is “the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.”