Disabled by “Repair”: The Textual and Extratextual Prosthesis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The (Love of the) Last Tycoon by Katie Warczak

Disabled by “Repair”: The Textual and Extratextual Prosthesis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The (Love of the) Last Tycoon by Katie Warczak

English

F. Scott Fitzgerald's final unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western is a text that has historically received minimal scholarly attention due ot its incomplete state. Most often put in dialogue with other Fitzgerald works, such as The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), Tycoon has been the subject of few independent studies, unless the focus has been on the text's "tragic" unfinished status. This label of "incomplete" led the work's editors, Edmund Wilson in 1941 and Matthew J. Bruccoli in 1993, to attempt to "finish" the novel by including introductions, facsimiles of Fitzgerald's notes, and, in Wilson's case, a synopsis of Fitzgerald's outline for the remainder of the work, in their respective editions. However, this paper argues that such attempts to "repair" Tycoon have only disabled the novel by adding extratextual prostheses that make the individual editions of Tycoon more about the editor than the author or the text. By applying David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder's textual theory of narrative prosthesis at the extratextual level, the problematic editorial prostheses reveal themselves and point to the need for a new way to read unfinished texts. This new method involves removing previously normalized prostheses, such as introductions, notes, and the tagline of "unfinished," from the published versions of incomplete texts in order to encourage readers to come to their own conclusions about these works and foster a broader conversation about unfinished literature that centers on editorial and textual theory rather than tragedy.

Warczak, Katie

Senior Showcase Oral presentation

Ripon College

April 19, 2016

The author reserves all rights.

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Majors: English, History
Minor: German and American Studies

Oshkosh, WI

ENG 430 - Senior Seminar