Yale professor Wai Chee Dimock lectures on The Great Gatsby as part of her course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner. She opens with editor Maxwell Perkins's complaint that the novel was too vague, and reframes that vagueness as a deliberate counter-realism built from Fitzgerald's habit of animating inanimate objects, giving motion and emotion to lawns, ashes, juicers, telephones, and automobiles. Dimock traces this technique through specific scenes, including the recurring telephone and the automobile as instruments of both social display and death. She closes with a short meditation on race in the novel, pointing students toward its scattered moments of racial differentiation as material for closer reading. The lecture moves chapter by chapter through close textual analysis rather than plot summary, treating Fitzgerald's prose style itself as the primary evidence for his literary experimentation.