乔治·威尔逊之死:《了不起的盖茨比》的新历史主义解读

The Death of George Wilson: An Interpretation of The Great Gatsby from the Perspective of New Historicism

文章从新历史主义视角解读《了不起的盖茨比》,从三个不同方面探讨造成威尔逊悲剧的社会根源,即文本的历史性和历史的文本性、颠覆与抑制、权力话语与"疯癫",从而深刻把握历史与文本的辩证关系。

F.Scott Fitzgerald’ s masterpiece The Great Gatsby shows every aspect of the extravagant life style of the United States in post World War I period.Fitzgerald is thereby called the spokesman of the Jazz Age.This paper aims to study the characterization of George Wilson, who is a marginal figure in the novel,from the perspec-tive of New Historicism.This paper probes into the social causes for Wilson ’ s tragedy from three aspects:The his-toricity of texts and the texuality of the histories , subversion and containment,power discourse and“madness”.By applying the New Historical theories to the analysis of the novel , one can get a better understanding of the dialecti-cal relationship between history and text.By studying the unequal power relation, this paper comes to the conclu-sion that Wilson’ s“non-beingness” is derived from the endless containment from the privileged class people and his“madness” is the product of power discourse.