DOCSLIB.ORG

White T L E Thesis Office 5

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
White T L E Thesis Office 5 THE LAST EDUCATIONS: GENRE, PLACE, AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY A Dissertation by LOWELL MICK WHITE Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2010 Major Subject: English The Last Educations: Genre, Place, and the American University Copyright 2010 Lowell Mick White THE LAST EDUCATIONS: GENRE, PLACE, AND THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY A Dissertation by LOWELL MICK WHITE Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, Paul N. Christensen Committee Members, Jerome Loving Larry Heinemann John J. McDermott Head of Department, M. Jimmie Killingsworth August 2010 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT The Last Educations: Genre, Place, and the American University. (August 2010) Lowell Mick White, B.A., University of Texas at Austin; M.A., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Paul N. Christensen The Last Educations: Genre, Place, and the American University consists of three interlocking novellas dealing with themes of change and dislocation in contemporary Texas, focused on the institution of the modern university, an institution that itself is undergoing rapid and irreversible change. Crucial to the dissertation is a thorough understanding and demonstrated proficiency of the genre of the novella. The creative text will illustrate how the novella can be used to achieve narrative depth and insight into the changing social context of the contemporary individual; the critical introduction will discuss the history of the genre and its emergence in recent years as a powerful vehicle for the depiction of change. The overall subject of the creative text is change, and the ways in which individuals react to change—changes to the institutions to which they devote their lives, and changes in the localities and regions they inhabit. The immediate setting for the novellas is the contemporary university, an institution currently undergoing transformations which will have implications for all of American society. iv DEDICATION To the memories of Glen Lowell White, Ph.D. (1928-1976) and Carol Mick White, Ph.D (1933-1988) v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many people helped this dissertation become what it is. Pamela Booton provided crucial support at all times, and wise advice was offered by Patricia Bjorklund, Abigail Bowers, Alysa Hayes, Chuck Taylor, and Javier Van Wisse. My committee chair, Dr. Paul Christensen, was always a source of wisdom and enlightenment, and the members of my committee—Dr. Jerome Loving, Larry Heinemann, and Dr. John J. McDermott—were very generous with their advice, time, and encouragement. Special gratitude is extended to Frederick Von Drasek for giving me the initial idea to go to graduate school, and to my students, for providing much encouragement and amusement along the way. Thanks to everyone. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………. iii DEDICATION…………………………………………………………………. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………........................ vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION……………………………………………….. 1 The Novella………………………………………………….. 3 The University as Place……………………………………… 14 Regional Literatures and Southwestern Literatures…………. 32 The Last Educations…………………………………………. 47 II FATE……………………………………………………………. 61 III THE CONSOLATIONS OF EMPIRE………………………….. 126 IV INCOMPLETE………………………………………………….. 191 V SUMMARY……………………………………………………... 250 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………….. 252 VITA…………………………………………………………………………… 259 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION My dissertation, The Last Educations: Genre, Place, and the American University , consists of three interlocking novellas dealing with themes of change and dislocation in contemporary Texas, focused on the institution of the modern university, an institution that itself is undergoing rapid and irreversible change. Crucial to the dissertation is a thorough understanding and demonstrated proficiency of the genre of the novella. The creative text will illustrate how the novella can be used to achieve narrative depth and insight into the changing social context of the contemporary individual; the critical introduction will discuss the history of the genre and its emergence in recent years as a powerful vehicle for the depiction of change. The overall subject of the creative text is change, and the ways in which individuals react to change—changes to the institutions to which they devote their lives, and changes in the localities and regions they inhabit. The immediate setting for the novellas is the contemporary university, an institution currently undergoing transformations which will have implications for all of American society. Increasing corporatism on the part of administrators, along with the consumerist demands of the public, are displacing traditional areas of scholarship and changing the way that knowledge is transferred—in many cases ___________ This dissertation follows the style of Southwestern American Literature. 2 actually transforming “knowledge” itself into “information,” and altering conventional forms of pedagogy. By setting The Last Educations on a university campus, I attempt to show these changes through the actions of individuals who are also stressed, caught at moments of deep personal dislocation and anomie. The larger setting of the novellas will be the southwestern United States, with a focus on the state of Texas. Texas, in the midst of a population boom that will increase its national political and cultural power, is, at the same time, through changing demographics within the population boom, undergoing an alteration of its own ethnic self-image. Through its location at the border between the United States and Mexico, Texas has always been a shatterbelt of competing cultures and values: Native Americans and Mexicans were overrun by Anglo Americans, who were followed in the later 19 th century by waves of immigrants from Central Europe, and in the 20 th century by internal migrants from the American Midwest, and by immigrants from Latin America. By the turn of the 20 th century, a regional myth developed that valorized the Anglo frontier and its associated white-male political supremacy; however, that mythic world no longer exists (whether it ever did is another question), for the state that is emerging in the 21 st century is urban, disassociated from the region and its history, and increasingly non-white. This diverse present is engaged in a constant dialogue with the mythic past, a dialogue in which meaning and status are undergoing a continual redefinition. This tumult of dislocative change is an aspect of the setting of The Last Educations . This introduction contains four sections detailing the scope and objectives of the dissertation project. Part One discusses the evolution of the novella as a genre primarily concerned with societal change. Parts Two and Three discuss how changes in the 3 contemporary university and the southwest can be efficiently depicted by novellas. Part Four offers a short discussion of the three novellas which comprise the creative portion of the dissertation. The Summary which follows the creative text briefly discusses my personal and professional relationship to the dissertation. The ultimate questions this dissertation responds to are complex: How much loyalty do individuals owe institutions? What is the proper reaction to change? What does it mean to be educated? How do people relate to their location? The answers, I think, are demonstrated in the lives enacted by the people of the Southwest, in the almost innumerable choices they make every day: choices in housing, education, employment, in the basic construction of their lives. The Last Educations is intended to exhibit the form of the novella and a deep understanding of how the novella is used to depict societal and institutional change. The Novella In recent years the genre of the novella has enjoyed a renaissance both in terms of popular readership and critical interest. Numerous st`ory collections are anchored by a novella, collections of linked novellas are marketed as novels, and at least two publishers have emerged in recent years specializing in the publication and promotion of novellas. Writing in a recent issue of Poets and Writers , novellist Josh Weil says that the form has been “reborn around the world,” giving readers a reading experience “just long enough to lose [oneself] in” (31). In an essay listing her favorite novellas, Rene Gladman asks: 4 …to venture into the writing of our own novellas, we have to, in a sense, define what is at stake. What is it about our subject, or our relation to that subject, our thinking of it, that demands this particular form? (Gladman essay) For me, it has become clear that the novella’s combination of compositional brevity and narrative depth make it a particularly useful vehicle in which to depict the psychology of the individual in a rapidly changing world, as well as the relationships between individuals and locational space. The novella is a form whose roots stretch a surprisingly long way back into Western literary history. In Anatomy of the Novella , Robert J. Clements and Joseph Gibaldi trace the term back to the classic world and the Latin novellus , meaning “young or new,” which was used to refer to treatises on animal husbandry; by the 14 th century the word had acquired additional meanings in Italian, including
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Vietnam War Literature and the Vietnam
    Searching for Closure: Vietnam War Literature and the Veterans Memorial by Charles J. Gaspar That many soldiers returned home from the battlefields of Vietnam only to find themselves mired in another battle in their own country is well recognized now. A vignette which opens the Preface to Frederick Downs' compelling memoir, The Killing Zone, makes this point dramatically: In the fall of 1968, as I stopped at a traffic light on my walk to class across the campus of the University of 3enver, a man stepped up to me and said "Hi." Without waiting for my reply to his greeting, he pointed to the hook sticking out of my left sleeve. "Get that in Vietnam?" I said, "Yeah, up near Tam Ky, in I Corps." "Serves you right." As the man walked away, I stood rooted, too confused with hurt, shame, and anger to react. (n.pag. [vii]) This theme - that there was no easy closure for the trauma of the war experience for the individual soldier - recurs throughout many Vietnam War narratives. "Senator," a wounded veteran in James Webb's Fields of Fire, knows this truth and rebukes his father's cajolery with the assertion that "It'll never be over, Dad. Most of it hasn't even started yet" (392). Similarly, Tim O'Brien's hero in his first novel, Northern Lights, tells his brother only half jokingly, "Glad I didn't wear my uniform. Look plain silly coming home in a uniform and no parade" (24). Indeed, powerful recent narratives such as Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story and Philip Caputo's Indian Country have shifted the focus from the soldier in combat to the soldier as he attempts to reconnect with the mainstream of American society.
    [Show full text]
  • Wayne Karlin
    Writing the War Wayne Karlin Kissing the Dead …I have thumped and blown into your kind too often, I grow tired of kissing the dead. —Basil T. Paquet’s (former Army medic) “Morning, a Death” in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans n November 2017, the old war intruded again onto America’s consciousness, at least that portion of the population that still watches PBS and whose conception of an even older I war was informed by the soft Southern drawl of Shelby Foote, sepia images of Yankees and Confederates, and the violin lamentations of Ashokan Farewell, all collaged by Ken Burns in his 1990 landmark documentary about the Civil War. Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s new series on the Vietnam War evoked arguments among everyone I knew who watched it; their reactions to it were like conceptions of the war itself: the nine blind Indians touching different parts of the elephant, assuming each was the whole animal. Three words tended to capture my own reaction to the series: “the Walking Dead,” a phrase that these days connotes a TV show about zombies but was the name given to what we Marines call One-Nine, meaning the First Battalion of the Ninth Marines, meaning the ungodly number of Marines killed in action from that battalion, which fought, as one of its former members interviewed by Burns and Novick recalled, along the ironically-named Demilitarized Zone, the DMZ. The Dead Marine Zone, as the veteran interviewed more accurately called it, and what I saw after I watched his segment was the dead I’d seen piled on the deck of the CH-46 War, Literature & the Arts: an international journal of the humanities / Volume 31 / 2019 I flew in as a helicopter gunner during operations in that area.
    [Show full text]
  • War and American Literature Edited by Jennifer Haytock Frontmatter More Information
    Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49680-3 — War and American Literature Edited by Jennifer Haytock Frontmatter More Information WAR AND AMERICAN LITERATURE This volume examines representations of war throughout American literary history, providing a firm grounding in established criticism and opening up new lines of inquiry. Readers will find accessible yet sophisticated essays that lay out key questions and scholarship in the field. War and American Literature offers a comprehensive synthesis of the literature and scholarship of US war writing, illuminates how themes, texts, and authors resonate across time and wars, and pro- vides multiple contexts in which texts and a war’s literature can be framed. By focusing on American war writing, from the wars with the Native Americans and the Revolutionary War to the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this volume illuminates the unique role repre- sentations of war have in the US imagination. is professor of English at SUNY Brockport. She has published At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature () and the Routledge Introduction to American War Literature () as well as works on twentieth- century American women writers. She is Brockport’s winner of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-108-49680-3 — War and American Literature Edited by Jennifer Haytock Frontmatter More Information Twenty-first-century America puzzles many citizens and observers. A frequently cited phrase to describe current partisan divisions is Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” a warning of the perils to the Union from divisions generated by slavery.
    [Show full text]
  • Guide to MS677 Vietnam War-Related Publications
    University of Texas at El Paso ScholarWorks@UTEP Finding Aids Special Collections Department 1-31-2020 Guide to MS677 Vietnam War-related publications Carolina Mercado Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.utep.edu/finding_aid This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Collections Department at ScholarWorks@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Finding Aids by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Guide to MS 677 Vietnam War-related publications 1962 – 2010s Span Dates, 1966 – 1980s Bulk Dates 3 feet (linear) Inventory by Carolina Mercado July 30, 2019; January 31, 2020 Donated by Howard McCord and Dennis Bixler-Marquez. Citation: Vietnam War-related publications, MS677, C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department. The University of Texas at El Paso Library. C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department University of Texas at El Paso Historical Sketch The Vietnam War (1954 – 1975) was a military conflict between the communist North Vietnamese (Viet Cong) and its allies and the government of South Vietnam and its allies (mainly the United States). The North Vietnamese sought to unify Vietnam under a communist regime, while South Vietnam wanted to retain its government, which was aligned with the West. The war was also a result of the ongoing Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. On July 2, 1976 the North Vietnamese united the country after the South Vietnamese government surrendered on April 30. Millions of soldiers and civilians were killed during the Vietnam War. [Source: Encyclopedia Britannica, “The Vietnam War,” accessed on January 31, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War] Series Description or Arrangement This collection was left in the order found by the archivist.
    [Show full text]
  • Top 30 Vietnam War Books
    America's wars have inspired some of the world's best literature, and the Vietnam War is no exception By Marc Leepson The Vietnam War has left many legacies. Among the most positive is an abundance of top-notch books, many written by veterans of the conflict. NONFICTION These include winners of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR: • • • • • both fiction and nonfiction. A slew of war memoirs stand with the best THE UNITED STATES writing of that genre. Nearly all of the big books about the Vietnam War AND VIETNAM, 1950-1975 remain in print in 2014, and the 50th anniversary commemoration of by George Herring, 1978 the war is an opportune time to recognize the best of them. This book is widely viewed as the besj concise history of the Vietnam War. Her• In the short history of Vietnam War literature, publishers would ring, a former University of Kentucky hardly touch a book on the war until the late 1970s and early 1980s—a history professor, covers virtually every part of the self-induced national amnesia about that conflict and its important event in the conflict, present• outcome. After sufficient time had elapsed to ease some of the war's ing the war objectively and assessing its psychic wounds, we saw a mini explosion of important books. Most legacy. Revised and updated over the of the books on the following, very subjective, list of the top 15 fiction years, America's Longest War is used in and nonfiction titles, came out in the late '70s and throughout the '80s.
    [Show full text]
  • The Vietnam War: 50 Years on SEPTEMBER 8-9, 2015 • JAMES A
    The Vietnam War: 50 Years On SEPTEMBER 8-9, 2015 • JAMES A. BAKER III HALL, RICE UNIVERSITY ABOUT THE EVENT “The Vietnam War: 50 Years On,” a special event co- hosted by the Baker Institute’s young professionals groups and the Rice Veterans in Business Association (VIBA) at the Jones Graduate School of Business, will commemorate one of the most controversial periods in U.S. history. On September 9, four critically acclaimed writers — Philip Caputo, Larry Heinemann, Tim O’Brien, and Tobias Wolff — will participate in a panel discussion at the institute, using literature as a lens to examine the war’s legacy. All four served in Vietnam in the infantry or Special Forces before launching their literary careers. The authors will discuss not only the effect of the war on their writing, but also its relevance in the post-9/11 era The Honorable James A. Baker, III, reflected on his public service and the human cost of policy decisions. under three U.S. presidents and the founding of the Baker Institute at an exclusive Roundtable Young Professionals event. In addition to the panel discussion, the authors will visit campus for two days, talking informally with members of the institute’s young professionals groups — the Emerging Leaders and Associate Roundtable — and with military veterans enrolled at Rice University. The Baker Institute will host a 5:00 p.m. reception for the authors prior to the 6:00 p.m. panel discussion on September 9. A brief book-signing session will follow. While the special event observes the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, it is also intended to spotlight the growing presence of veterans at Rice University.
    [Show full text]
  • BOOKS and SHELVES Thursday, June 24, to Saturday, Aug
    AND BOOKS SHELVES Mark Arctander Stephanie Brooks Gary Cannone Bill Davenport Anthony Elms Nicholas Frank Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam College of DuPage Rashid Johnson Deva Maitland and Robyn O’Neil Michael Piazza Karen Reimer Joe Scanlan Buzz Spector A Reading List Several students and colleagues have asked me for a reading list, or rather, for several reading lists since each by Buzz Spector request carried with it some expectation of an individualized selection of texts. Why have I been asked? What is meant by such a request? I refer to many books, articles, catalogs and letters in the course of my teaching, and have never encountered a student who was familiar with my every citation. This is neither evidence of a superlative pedagogy on my part nor (necessarily) of a deficiency in the reading experiences of my peers. I have not read any significant portion of texts available in the field of even my most specific intellectual interest. No one’s read everything, for that matter, and other issues, of economies of collecting, of diverse literary taste, of local access to specific books, further complicates things. I will claim to be reasonably well read for the responsibilities of my profession, but it isn’t “required readings” that comprise the kind of syllabus which is my subject here. Reading means very much to me and I know that some of the enjoyment I take from the activity itself, which is distinct from mastery of given subject matter, comes through in my academic method. The request for a reading list arises more, I believe, from a certain engagement between persons than from recognitions of a thematic ignorance of facts.
    [Show full text]
  • AMERIŠKA DRŽAVNA NAGRADA ZA KNJIŽEVNOST Nagrajene Knjige, Ki
    AMERIŠKA DRŽAVNA NAGRADA ZA KNJIŽEVNOST Nagrajene knjige, ki jih imamo v naši knjižnični zbirki, so označene debelejše: Roman/kratke zgodbe 2018 Sigrid Nunez: The Friend 2017 Jesmyn Ward: Sing, Unburied, Sing 2016 Colson Whitehead THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 2015 Adam Johnson FORTUNE SMILES: STORIES 2014 Phil Klay REDEPLOYMENT 2013 James McBrid THE GOOD LORD BIRD 2012 Louise Erdrich THE ROUND HOUSE 2011 Jesmyn Ward SALVAGE THE BONES 2010 Jaimy Gordon LORD OF MISRULE 2009 Colum McCann LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (Naj se širni svet vrti, 2010) 2008 Peter Matthiessen SHADOW COUNTRY 2007 Denis Johnson TREE OF SMOKE 2006 Richard Powers THE ECHO MAKER 2005 William T. Vollmann EUROPE CENTRAL 2004 Lily Tuck THE NEWS FROM PARAGUAY 2003 Shirley Hazzard THE GREAT FIRE 2002 Julia Glass THREE JUNES 2001 Jonathan Franzen THE CORRECTIONS (Popravki, 2005) 2000 Susan Sontag IN AMERICA 1999 Ha Jin WAITING (Čakanje, 2008) 1998 Alice McDermott CHARMING BILLY 1997 Charles Frazier COLD MOUNTAIN 1996 Andrea Barrett SHIP FEVER AND OTHER STORIES 1995 Philip Roth SABBATH'S THEATER 1994 William Gaddis A FROLIC OF HIS OWN 1993 E. Annie Proulx THE SHIPPING NEWS (Ladijske novice, 2009; prev. Katarina Mahnič) 1992 Cormac McCarthy ALL THE PRETTY HORSES 1991 Norman Rush MATING 1990 Charles Johnson MIDDLE PASSAGE 1989 John Casey SPARTINA 1988 Pete Dexter PARIS TROUT 1987 Larry Heinemann PACO'S STORY 1986 Edgar Lawrence Doctorow WORLD'S FAIR 1985 Don DeLillo WHITE NOISE (Beli šum, 2003) 1984 Ellen Gilchrist VICTORY OVER JAPAN: A BOOK OF STORIES 1983 Alice Walker THE COLOR PURPLE
    [Show full text]
  • Fiction Award Winners 2019
    1989: Spartina by John Casey 2016: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen National Book 1988: Paris Trout by Pete Dexter 2015: All the Light We Cannot See by A. Doerr 1987: Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann 2014: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Award 1986: World’s Fair by E. L. Doctorow 2013: Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson 1985: White Noise by Don DeLillo 2012: No prize awarded 2011: A Visit from the Goon Squad “Established in 1950, the National Book Award is an 1984: Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist by Jennifer Egan American literary prize administered by the National 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker 2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization.” 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike 2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout - from the National Book Foundation website. 1980: Sophie’s Choice by William Styron 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 1979: Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien by Junot Diaz 2018: The Friend by Sigrid Nunez 1978: Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward 1977: The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks 2016: The Underground Railroad by Colson 1976: J.R. by William Gaddis 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson Whitehead 1975: Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones 2015: Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson The Hair of Harold Roux 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 2014: Redeployment by Phil Klay by Thomas Williams 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo 2013: Good Lord Bird by James McBride 1974: Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon 2001: The Amazing Adventures of 2012: Round House by Louise Erdrich 1973: Chimera by John Barth Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon 2011: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward 1972: The Complete Stories 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 2010: Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon by Flannery O’Connor 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham 2009: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann 1971: Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ethnicization of Veteran America: Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, and Military Whiteness After Vietnam
    JOSEPH DARDA The Ethnicization of Veteran America: Larry Heinemann, Toni Morrison, and Military Whiteness after Vietnam To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination o the astonishment of book critics, in November 1987, Larry Heinemann’s Vietnam War novel Paco’s Story (1986) won the National Book Award for Fiction over T Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). When Heinemann’s name was announced during the black-tie event at Manhattan’s Pierre Hotel, the audience of authors, editors, and booksellers was silent at first, caught off-guard by the decision. Among the nomi- nees, Philip Roth’s The Counterlife (1986) had been considered the only real contender to Beloved. Morrison had invited three tables of friends and associates, and they, like the rest of the ballroom, were shocked to hear this unfamiliar name. Heinemann, a middle-aged, second-time novelist from Chicago, took the stage and stated the obvious: “This is an interesting surprise” (qtd. in McDowell). Heinemann’s win was met with immediate criticism as another instance of the book industry serving the interests and reinforcing the status of the white male author. Two months later, forty-eight This essay is indebted to conversations with Maria Bo, Mai-Linh Hong, Jang Huh, Mar- iam Lam, Olivia Moy, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Maria Seger, Sunny Yang, and James Zeigler.
    [Show full text]
  • Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number Article 1 1-2
    Vietnam Generation Volume 4 Number 1 Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number Article 1 1-2 4-1992 Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number 1-2 Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation (1992) "Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number 1-2," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 4 : No. 1 , Article 1. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol4/iss1/1 This Complete Volume is brought to you for free and open access by La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vietnam Generation by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Viet Nam Generation, Volume 4, Number 1-2 Cover Page Footnote Edited by Dan Duffy. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson. This complete volume is available in Vietnam Generation: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol4/iss1/1 Viet N am Generation A Journal of Recent History and Contemporary Issues Volume A Number 1-2 David Luebke illustrations, from the Vietnam Generation, Inc. & Burning Cities Press reprint of Asa Baber's novel, Land of a Million Elephants. Contents In This Is s u e ........................................................................................ 5 Poetry by Rod McQuearey.................................................... 79 PublishER's Sta tem en t.................................................................4
    [Show full text]
  • In Search of the Great American Political Novel of the Vietnam War Philip Beidler
    In Search of the Great American Political Novel of the Vietnam War Philip Beidler Nearly five decades after the large-scale commitment of US combat forces into the Vietnam Conflict and nearly four decades after the fall of the South to victorious Communist invaders, a pervasive myth attending American conduct of the war remains that US defeat occurred not on the battlefield, but in the arena of American national opinion. Accordingly, fictional narrative of the Vietnam War has frequently concerned itself both with the military experience of the war abroad and with its deeply contested domestic reverberations in the American polis and the American body politic. This has frequently led to the re-writing of the political novel in its traditional sense, as the individual protagonist responds to direct personal experience of the war, while attending on return to often conflicted personal and ideological attitudes toward the affairs of politics and the operations of the state. In important instances, the form might be thus said to honor the tradition of Dostoevsky; Turgenev; Stendhal; Dickens; and, later, Joseph Conrad; André Malraux; and Graham Greene—albeit filtered through certain twentieth-century American subgenres: visions of absurd apocalypse, such as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, at once indictments of twentieth- century war and of what Alfred Kazin has called the war-breeding system; and variations on the popular mid-century Washington novel in works as diverse as Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent, and Fletcher Knebel’s and Richard Bailey’s Seven Days in May.
    [Show full text]