Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam

Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam
Author: Aleksandra Musiał
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2020-03-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000054284

This book revisits the American canon of novels, memoirs, and films about the war in Vietnam, in order to reassess critically the centrality of the discourse of American victimization in the country’s imagination of the conflict, and to trace the strategies of representation that establish American soldiers and veterans as the most significant victims of the war. By investigating in detail the imagery of the Vietnamese landscape recreated by American authors and directors, the volume explores the proposition that Vietnam has been turned into an American myth, demonstrating that the process resulted in a dehistoricization and mystification of the conflict that obscured its historical and political realities. Against this background, representations of the war’s victims—Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers—are then considered in light of their ideological meanings and uses. Ultimately, the book seeks to demonstrate how, in a relation of power, the question of victimhood can become ideologized, transforming into both a discourse and a strategy of representation—and in doing so, to demythologize something of the "Vietnam" of American cultural narrative.

Voices from the Vietnam War

Voices from the Vietnam War
Author: Xiaobing Li
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2010-06-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813173868

The Vietnam War's influence on politics, foreign policy, and subsequent military campaigns is the center of much debate and analysis. But the impact on veterans across the globe, as well as the war's effects on individual lives and communities, is a largely neglected issue. As a consequence of cultural and legal barriers, the oral histories of the Vietnam War currently available in English are predictably one-sided, providing limited insight into the inner workings of the Communist nations that participated in the war. Furthermore, many of these accounts focus on combat experiences rather than the backgrounds, belief systems, and social experiences of interviewees, resulting in an incomplete historiography of the war. Chinese native Xiaobing Li corrects this oversight in Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans. Li spent seven years gathering hundreds of personal accounts from survivors of the war, accounts that span continents, nationalities, and political affiliations. The twenty-two intimate stories in the book feature the experiences of American, Chinese, Russian, Korean, and North and South Vietnamese veterans, representing the views of both anti-Communist and Communist participants, including Chinese officers of the PLA, a Russian missile-training instructor, and a KGB spy. These narratives humanize and contextualize the war's events while shedding light on aspects of the war previously unknown to Western scholars. Providing fresh perspectives on a long-discussed topic, Voices from the Vietnam War offers a thorough and unique understanding of America's longest war.

America's War in Vietnam

America's War in Vietnam
Author: Larry H. Addington
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2000-04-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780253213600

An overview of the Vietnam War, with an emphasis on its military campaigns and political issues.

Close Quarters

Close Quarters
Author: Larry Heinemann
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2010-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307517705

From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict--Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford. In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War

Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War
Author: John A. Wood
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821445626

In the decades since the Vietnam War, veteran memoirs have influenced Americans’ understanding of the conflict. Yet few historians or literary scholars have scrutinized how the genre has shaped the nation’s collective memory of the war and its aftermath. Instead, veterans’ accounts are mined for colorful quotes and then dropped from public discourse; are accepted as factual sources with little attention to how memory, no matter how authentic, can diverge from events; or are not contextualized in terms of the race, gender, or class of the narrators. Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War is a landmark study of the cultural heritage of the war in Vietnam as presented through the experience of its American participants. Crossing disciplinary borders in ways rarely attempted by historians, John A. Wood unearths truths embedded in the memoirists’ treatments of combat, the Vietnamese people, race relations in the United States military, male-female relationships in the war zone, and veterans’ postwar troubles. He also examines the publishing industry’s influence on collective memory, discussing, for example, the tendency of publishers and reviewers to privilege memoirs critical of the war. Veteran Narratives is a significant and original addition to the literature on Vietnam veterans and the conflict as a whole.

Vietnam War Stories

Vietnam War Stories
Author: Tobey C. Herzog
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2017-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 113490262X

Dealing with ten key narratives, including novels and personal accounts, Herzog locates them in the tradition of war literature as well as recent cinema, and charts the transformations of the American nation in its experience of modern war.

Walking Point

Walking Point
Author: Thomas Myers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 1988-07-07
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0195363841

Arguing that the unprecedented nature of our first postmodernist war demanded either the revision of traditional modes of war writing or the discovery of new styles that would render the emotional and psychological center of a new national trauma, this study assesses the most important novels and personal memoirs written by Americans about the Vietnam War. Myers examines the work of Tim O'Brien, David Halberstam, Ward Just, Stephen Wright, John Del Vecchio, and others working in the modes of realism, the classical memoir, black humor, revised romanticism, and mnemonic narrative. Drawing on the work of thinkers such as Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, and Michel Foucault--whose understanding of the written text as a battleground of competing historical voices expands any definition of historical text--Myers defines the historical novel as a text that self-consciously and imaginatively shapes lived experience into a readable aesthetic form.

"There It Is": Narratives of the Vietnam War

Author: Tom Burns
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 688
Release: 2021-09-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3838215613

This book provides a critical survey of the literature on the Vietnam War and is intended both for academic and general readers. Earlier works of this kind constantly recycled criticism of a half-dozen of the same works. In this study, the aim was to discuss a much greater number of works, including a few that have never been discussed. To appeal to non-academic readers, Lit-Crit jargon was kept to a minimum, and parallels with earlier works of war literature, especially those of the two world wars, were established.