Chinese Postmodernity In The Great Gatsby

My understanding is that Chinese postmodernity is the implosion of Maoist civilization, a space of struggle between the residual of the socialist past and the illusion of the present. Here is where an additional version of Chinese postmodernism establishes itself: after the economic theorem and the historical periodization, it is the time of aesthetic practices. The horrors of the past (Maoism) and the violence of the post-Maoist regime (Tiananmen 1989) generates a general condition of alienation and disillusionment fused with a not well-defined sense of nostalgia, a sentimental retrospection over whatever past epoch, Shanghai in the 1930s or the Liberation time, aimed to deal with the present. Postmodernism develops into an aesthetic moment of differentiation, division, disaggregation, disintegration of patriarchal communism, virtually the secularization of Chinese society. Under these circumstances, by questioning the very nature of real writers overturned centuries of

A cultural credo whose sociological roots are somewhere between a `Napoleon complex` and Victorian morality, and whose pragmatism lies in class mobility and ideal family. The Great Gatsby works out exquisitely as representative case. Written in 1925, the novel serves as a bridge between World War I and the Great Depression of the early 1930's. What we have all around is the glamour of the Jazz age, the `Roaring Twenties` and indeed the failure of the American Dream. Gatsby is a truly American character, a firm believer in the American Dream of self-made success: he has, after all, not only invented and self-promoted a whole new persona for himself, but has succeeded both financially and socially. The American Dream then of the post-war generation or of those who arrived in America with the promise of future in their