Visions of the Present: Nostalgias in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film

Although generally understood to denote a wistful desire for the past, nostalgia may assume a variety of forms.This dissertation explores nostalgias (i.e., diverse nostalgic modes and expressions of nostalgia) in twentieth-century American fiction and film.Specifically, it interrogates the critical functions of nostalgia in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Elliott Nugent's The Great Gatsby (1949), Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1953), and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973).Attending to narrative and formal expressions of nostalgia in these novels and films, as well as readers' and viewers' experiences of nostalgia in response to these works, Visions of the Present scrutinizes both the role of nostalgia in such works and how artists employ nostalgia to articulate various social critiques.Chapter one examines conflicted impulses toward the past and future in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, clarifying how Fitzgerald engages contemporaneous debates by using nostalgia as a trope to satirize resistance to progress even as he uncovers a fundamental American paradox: efforts toward self-making are also often about trying to recover an irretrievable past.Chapter two considers the ways in which Nugent's The Great Gatsby expresses and nostalgically responds to different cultural anxieties of the 1940s.It illustrates how Nugent's film puts nostalgia to use in a national allegory that warns of repeating past mistakes.Chapter three addresses misreadings of nostalgia in Nabokov's Lolita by interrogating Nabokov's ironic employment of nostalgia in the novel.It identifies nostalgia as fundamental to Nabokov's censure of the commodification of childhood.Arguing that Nabokov's concept of aesthetic bliss conjoins Lolita's aesthetics and ethics, chapter three concludes that readers may experience aesthetic bliss by carefully observing the functions of nostalgia in Lolita.Chapter four analyzes the significance of subverting and perverting nostalgia in Kubrick's Lolita, revealing how the film condemns the sort of suburban pretense that potentially fuels multiple forms of discrimination.Chapter five details how Chandler uses the motif of nostalgia in The Long Goodbye to denounce mid-century American culture as inferior to his nostalgic view of nineteenth-century England.It attends to tensions between reflective and restorative nostalgia in the novel that expose Chandler's social critique as highly problematic.Chapter six investigates competing nostalgic drives in Altman's The Long Goodbye.It shows how the film questions nostalgia for the tough-guy figure of classic Hollywood crime genres to parody hypermasculinity and thereby challenge what it means to be a (male) hero in 1970s America.This chapter also demonstrates how Altman's complex treatment of nostalgia validates the male antihero embodied by the hard-boiled detective as a man of integrity, hence illuminating the film's simultaneously nostalgic and anti-nostalgic qualities.Visions of the Present thus elucidates how nostalgia is mobilized in numerous and unique ways within and across the novels and films under consideration.Explicating the ways these works often simultaneously elicit and reject nostalgia, this dissertation argues that nostalgia plays a centraland often overlooked-role in expressing artists' critiques of their own sociohistorical moments, their visions of the present.mentorship of many people.Foremost, I wish to extend my immense gratitude to my supervisor, Derek Nystrom, whose deeply engaged and thoughtful feedback has been invaluable to helping me develop my arguments and refine my work.I tremendously appreciate Derek's investment in this project and my success, his generosity of time, his patience with my stops and starts, his kindness, and his sense of humour.I am also grateful to Ned Schantz and Allan Hepburn, especially for their excellent input on an early version of chapter one that very much influenced how I approached subsequent chapters.It was a conversation with Ned from which the idea for this project germinated and for which I owe him a great deal.I am also indebted to Ned for encouraging me to think beyond nostalgic content, to contemplate nostalgic aesthetics.

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