Date of Graduation
Spring 2018
Degree
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
Committee Chair
Matthew Calihman
Abstract
This study examines the quest for the American Dream in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in light of the politics of ethnicity and national identity and cultural cosmopolitanism. The two novels are analyzed in the context of the city in early twentieth-century America and post-9/11 America, respectively. I interpret the texts’ quest for the American Dream as a quest for an inclusive national identity that is consistent with the cosmopolitan principles of coexistence and individual obligation toward others—beyond the social boundaries of ethnicity and culture and beyond the political boundary of citizenship. I argue that the novels’ protagonists fantasize New York City as the site of an American cosmopolitanism. However, their fantasies are shattered when the protagonists fail to achieve the American Dream and attain national belonging. I conclude that Fitzgerald and Hamid warn against the formation of ethnocentric nationalism and offer a cultural cosmopolitanism as an alternative.
Keywords
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mohsin Hamid, personal identity, cultural cosmopolitanism, ethnocentric nationalism, migration, national belonging, American Dream, ethnic literature, otherness
Subject Categories
English Language and Literature
Copyright
© Hana Mohammed Smail
Recommended Citation
Smail, Hana Mohammed, "“Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”: Ethnocentric Nationalism, Cultural Cosmopolitanism, and the Reinvention of Personal Identity in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist" (2018). MSU Graduate Theses. 3265.
https://bearworks.missouristate.edu/theses/3265
