Teaching Gatsby in the Age of AI

If I know anything from my two decades of teaching, it is that students—almost without fail—love The Great Gatsby. For some, it is admittedly the first required book they truly read—and by that I mean one of the first books they religiously mark up, toss across the room in frustration, clutch longingly to their chests as they run into the classroom eager to discuss, or finish at least a week early because they just can’t wait. It is the promise of a love story that does it, I think, or the glamorous images of Gatsby parties on their Instagram feeds, or even simple peer pressure—word of mouth works pretty well in a school of ambitious young women: “Gatsby was my favorite book last year; I cannot wait for you to read it!” For a number of special souls, it is Fitzgerald’s gorgeous language and nearly perfect style that reels them in.

I’ve personally never read such a symmetrically mesmerizing novel; I mean, Fitzgerald plants the green light in chapter one, waters it in chapter five (the dead center of the novel), and then harvests it in chapter nine with some of the most incredible lines: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——” I teared up just transcribing those words. It is the promise of opportunity even while said opportunity is being pulled right out from under you.

And by the time students finish the novel, they know they are part of a special club—a club that has actually read the book, not just watched the movie. As such, they know to laugh (or at least look askance) at a Gatsby-themed wedding or a Gatsby-inspired Halloween party at the White House because, as we chuckle, “Clearly these party planners haven’t read past chapter three.” (If it has been a while: chapter three is the infamous Gatsby party, with the “blue gardens” where the “men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”) There are no more beautiful Gatsby parties after this one; instead, for the remaining chapters we are treated to a largely sordid unraveling of human nature that culminates in a series of deaths, all told by a narrator who we increasingly question even as we seek to believe. Why anyone would want this story as the backdrop to their wedding is beyond us, we laugh.

For about the past ten years, my colleagues and I on the English III team have leveraged this student interest into asking them to write a fairly hefty literary analysis of the novel, driven by their own observations and questions. Like all the formal writing we do in our classes, we move through scaffolded steps that include typed and handwritten process work: journaling, formal annotations, in-depth quote charts, question development, hands-on thesis work, peer reviews, revisions.

This assignment has served us and the students well in part because it builds on the careful literary analysis work of their sophomore year, offering them another opportunity to demonstrate their close reading and writing skills—this time, though, with an even more sophisticated and independent flair, especially since they develop their own prompts. So, even though students might initially gripe and groan their way through the earlier stages of these essays, by the end they have a stronger sense of ownership and pride. Students write with their hearts, revise with their brains, and generally churn out beautiful pieces of themselves.

Of course, because Gatsby is one of the most frequently taught high school novels, students in the internet age have had easy access to an overwhelming wealth of online materials that they can “borrow” from as they write. My fellow English teachers and I are hyperaware of this access and have navigated this obstacle as best we can, largely through giving students choice and requiring extensive process work. Doing so has been a struggle—but possible. Survivable.

But then came generative AI.

Can you imagine if Daisy and Tom used ChatGPT to generate their martini recipes?

A couple years ago, I gasped when I saw that the MLA Handbook used The Great Gatsby as its example on how to cite generative AI. There, before my very eyes (and sanctioned by the MLA!), was a paragraph that looked vaguely like analysis, spit out in only a few seconds. Yes, it was missing quotes from the novel. Yes, it was bland, lifeless, and lacked the fluidity and nuance of a human writer. And yes, it was incredibly boring to read. But—it was making a couple moves that looked analytical. And if it could do that at such an early stage in its development, what would it be able to do in two, ten, twenty years? My head spun. Was the Gatsby literary analysis essay—and all other close reading assignments—headed to the curricular graveyard?  

Now, my short answer is no. (Of course it is a complicated no, but it is still a no. I will die on this hill.) At the time, though, I wasn’t so sure. When I shared some of these concerns with a teacher from another discipline, he simply stated, “Well, just don’t teach that novel anymore. Find a less well-known text that would be more difficult for AI to generate thoughts on.”

My initial reaction was to agree, so my teammates and I spent time thinking through potential replacements, reading new books with promising literary merit, digging back through the stacks of books we taught previously or read in undergrad and grad school, hoping to find a replacement. We even tried out a couple of these new texts as summer readings and as choice texts during a book club unit. And they were fine. Sort of. But they weren’t Gatsby.

But more importantly, a quick dip into the generative AI world showed me that it can offer a low-quality literary analysis of just about any text, no matter how obscure. Obscurity was not the answer.

So, Gatsby remained in the curriculum, and the junior team and I re-committed to keeping the unit’s focus on close, textual analysis. We believe that, even as AI creeps ever more insidiously into students’ lives, developing close reading skills are more essential than ever and that most students actually desire those skills, contrary to what some adults might think.

Maybe we are naïve. Maybe, like Gatsby, we have an “extraordinary gift for hope” in a battle that will end up killing us, dead in a pool, the gun in AI’s hands.

But I don’t think so.

For one, Gatsby has survived many potential deaths before this one; it is what great literature does. In fact, the novel almost didn’t even survive its own publication: it was a commercial flop following its release in 1925 and Fitzgerald died in 1940 still believing it was a failure. But five short years after his death, about a hundred and fifty-five thousand copies of the novel were shipped to soldiers overseas courtesy of the Council on Books in Wartime. And that’s when the Gatsby love really began, further cultivated by the rise of New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century, a theoretical approach to teaching literature that focuses on structure and style—what Gatsby has in spades. Pushback, however, began to emerge in the late 1980s and 90s during the shift to multicultural studies and culminated in the 2010s and the 2020s amid growing calls to replace or pair the novel with more diverse texts because of its racial and gender limitations. But that pushback, rather than canceling Gatsby, has instead transformed the teaching of it, and our junior team leans into these critiques, using them as opportunities for discussion. Gatsby is also currently surviving the exponential rise in book banning—despite its radical claims about the American Dream—as well as the trend of schools using excerpts instead of entire novels (it helps that the text is under 200 pages).

So, I think Gatsby will keep surviving.  

But we are also hopeful because close reading and literary analysis are not skills we should ever let our students farm out to AI. Let me repeat that again for those AI-education enthusiasts out there: close reading and literary analysis are essential skills that can atrophy if they are not used. The recent study that suggests as much is limited but is nevertheless troubling. What a horrible disservice to the young people in our care if we encourage them to quite literally paralyze themselves. I can imagine spaces for AI in education; as a crutch that replaces student brainstorming, drafting, and finessing their essays, though, is not that space.  

We have already written so much at Her Voice at the Table about our resistance to AI in the English classroom, so I won’t belabor the point or rehash our various rationales here. Feel free, though, to look back at a former student’s recognition that AI robbed her of the learning process or how another saw that using it was a give and take: yes, she might use it as tutorial support for a math or science class, but to use it for writing in her English and History courses was blasphemy. Rachel Davies has waxed eloquently on the necessity of mess in our learning processes, and Kate Schenck initially launched us into this conversation by asking whether we want to give away our story—and really, our soul—to a machine. Collectively, these posts capture our tenuous hope for the future of reading and writing in the age of AI.

So We Beat On: Close Reading and Writing in this New World

There is of course much to bemoan, but there is also much to celebrate. (We at HVATT are a hopeful lot.) The past couple of years have given me a chance to reflect on what the best parts of an English class are and how I can more intentionally call attention to those. Doing so may never make my classroom AI-proof, but no class is ever fully secure from students who want to skirt the system. Two recent articles by English professors highlight some of this good news: Johanna Winant’s “The Claims of Close Reading” and Carlo Rotella’s “I’m a Professor. A.I. Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse.” In the former, Winant honors the radical power of close reading and in the latter, Rotella reminds us that the rise of AI is a chance for teachers to return to those practices that make us human. 

There is of course much to bemoan, but there is also much to celebrate. (We at HVATT are a hopeful lot.) The past couple of years have given me a chance to reflect on what the best parts of an English class are and how I can more intentionally call attention to those.

So much of these two articles reflect either what we currently do in the classroom or what we have started to try, and below are a few highlights of what intellectual life looked like in our Gatsby unit this year. Was it perfect? No. Will we adjust next year? Of course.

Tech-free zones. No laptops out, ever, not even at the beginning of class. On their desks was Gatsby, their journal, and the cutest little mini-Oxford dictionary–an essential start to any legitimate close reading. How can you make meaning if you don’t even know the definition of a word? Students could mark the reading homework in their books or in their journals–or, in a panic, check the Daily Agenda in their Microsoft OneNote notebooks when they were at home. With no laptops on the desk, it also meant that we could look each other in the eyes during discussions, rather than sneaking back behind a laptop. 

A tech-free zone wasn’t an entirely new development for us, but what was new is that when it came time to start completing close reading charts–typically housed online–we kept those on paper too, and students taped/glued them into their journals. The only time we ever turned to the computer was: (1) On the intro to Gatsby day when we planned a party for the Fitzgeralds, a process that required researching them as a couple, Prohibition, bootlegging, 1920s architecture and the homes that inspired Gatsby, the music of the 1920s that would have been on Fitz’s Spotify, etc. and (2) When we typed a revised version of the close reading essay we sketched out in class (posted in our OneNote notebooks next to the picture of our handwritten version).   

Write in the classroom. Again, it isn’t a pedagogical innovation to make time in class for what you value most, but too often I have ended up just having students complete the vast majority of their writing at home–where they can panic and potentially make poor choices. So we had to streamline the curriculum to make space for more writing–and not just timed, assessed writing–in class. Doing so allowed students to recognize just how much they could accomplish without distractions and how strong of writers they were without the various crutches they might have turned to in the privacy of their homes.

Value the process. Thankfully I have only worked in English Departments that understand that the teaching of writing never includes giving students a prompt and then walking away (such was my own life as a high school student, though! Process work, what was that?). To state the obvious: we are not in school solely for outputs, we are here for learning. And so we need to be knee deep in that learning process with the students, giving them plenty of space to practice and think and revise before submitting anything for a final assessment. For this final assessment, we gave students a selection of passages from The Great Gatsby that they close read in class, using the charts from the unit. During the writing, they made connections to other passages in the novel (largely from the charts they had been collecting in their journals). Students handwrote these but then had the opportunity to revise for style as they typed them up. With the charts, the annotations on the passages, and the handwritten copies all uploaded into their OneNote notebooks, we could quite literally see their process in action.

Next year, I would love to weave in a couple of smaller, low-stakes and in-class opportunities for students to demonstrate not just their close reading skills but also the personal connections to the text through a process known as sacred reading. These activities are also not AI-proof, but it would take a special kind of student to offload their secret souls to a large language model. 

I’ll close by sharing a quick little opening journal activity I used to help students reflect on style. A couple weeks after finishing Gatsby, I gave students the following two sentences and asked them to write about the stylistic differences. The first is the final line of The Great Gatsby, the second is what Co-Pilot created when I asked it to “write a sentence that sounds like the final line of Gatsby”:  

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

And so we keep chasing, like moths drawn to the fleeting glow of a dream, always reaching, but never quite touching the stars we believed were ours. 

In each of my classes, the first student comments were something along the lines of: “They just give off different vibes. The first is more realistic—hopeful, but realistically so, and the second is overly optimistic and a little too sweet.” Two different vibes, eh? I echoed back to them. How did the language do that? And more importantly, what kind of fake vibe will AI create for you if you decide to let it?  

All Gatsby readers know, unlike poor Gatsby, that we can never fully recover the past–"Can't repeat the past? Why, of course you can!"--and as such, we have to learn to live with AI. And I am. We are. 

Megan Griffin is currently reading Karen Powell's Fifteen Wild Decembers.