Essay #4
Compare and Contrast
Topic: According to the authors of Spark Notes, “The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream in an era of unprecedented prosperity and material excess.” Compare and Contrast the concept of the American dream in The Great Gatsby with that of Americans today in the 21st Century.
Requirements: You may only use two sources: your novel and a database article. Follow these directions in finding the database article below.
Researching
1. Use the databases from the Paris Junior College Library 2. Go to the Paris Junior College webpage (www.parisjc.edu). From the Quick Links at the top of the page, choose, Library Services. On the left menu of the Library Services page, choose the Databases (Off-Campus) links. You will be prompted to enter your username (PJC student id) and password (birthdate), just like your Blackboard sign-in. Then go to the database titled Literary Reference Center. At the search bar, type in the last name of our author and the word AND in all caps and the title of the work AND a descriptor word like character and search (Fitzgerald AND The Great Gatsby AND American Dream). You should get a long list of works.

3. Scroll through and look for this source: Pidgeon, John. “The Great Gatsby.” 4. You can tell that it is an academic journal source from Modern Age and that there is a full PDF text version online. Click on the PDF Full Text blue link and the source will come up. 5. Now you can do a number of things. You can read the article from the screen or use the tool buttons on the right of the screen. You can Print the article or Save it to your computer or jumpdrive. You can click the Cite button and then scroll to MLA and copy and paste the citation to your works cited page (HIGHLY recommended!!). 6. Use this source as your second source for Essay 4 (compare/contrast). 7. Example. I have found a quote I want to use in essay 4 when I am contrasting the depiction of the American Dream according to Fitzgerald:

John Pidgeon argues in his article, “The Great Gatsby,” that the novel, The Great Gatsby, “is a criticism of American experience – not only of our manners, but of our basic historic attitude toward life. The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American Dream” (179).
Notice the signal phrase? The author’s name, the name of the article, and the name of the book is used in the signal phrase. “Quotation marks” are used for the article title and italics are used for the name of the novel. The citation for the Works Cited page can be copied and pasted right from the database by clicking on the yellow folder on the right hand side, labeled Cite. Scroll down and find the MLA version. You will use a signal phrase the first time you use this source in your paper. When you use it a second time or thereafter, only give the author’s last name in a parenthetic reference at the end of the quote/paraphrase/summary. The Works Cited for this article would appear as below:
Works Cited
Pidgeon, John A. "The Great Gatsby." Modern Age 49.2 (2007): 178-182. Literary Reference Center. Web. 5 June 2014.
Notice the second line is indented five spaces with a hanging indent.