Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative.

Neilson, Jim

doi:10.2307/2568913

The Journal of American History

2000

DOI: 10.2307/2568913

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Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative.

Jim Neilson

Abstract: Book Reviews 753 pointing but does not significantly mar Hershberger's valuable account of a form of peace movement activity that is often passed over by more conventional treatments of the subject.

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The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel

Belletto¹

2015

American Literature

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In the summer of 1952, novelist Pat Frank got a call from the United Nations asking him to make a documentary film about Korea. Frank had never been to Korea, nor did he speak the language or have any special knowledge about the Pacific Rim. But the previous year he had published a novel about the Korean War called Hold Back the Night, an accomplishment that apparently qualified him, at least in the eyes of the United Nation's Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), to script a film about the war and its effects on the peninsula. Frank accepted, and recounted his time in Korea in his next book, The Long Way Round (1953). Early on, he explains his charge by quoting the agent general of the UNKRA, who requested that the projected film "'show what has happened to the people of South Korea, what can be done to help them, and tell why it must be done. Thirty million people have been ground into the muck and dust of Asia on this battleground. The struggle is not only between armies, but between systems, ours below the 38th Parallel, theirs above. Which system is better? Which half of Korea will recover first?'" (Frank 1953, 23). Today, a more pointed question might be why an American novelist with only a glancing understanding of Korea and the Korean War could be presumed capable of representing the story of thirty million Koreans. Part of the answer rests in the way the agent general represents the "struggle," a figuration that both emblematizes how Asia was conceived in the early Cold War rhetorical frame and that echoes Frank's own treatment in Hold Back the Night. Perhaps the agent general appreciated the way Frank (1951, 164) had conceptualized the war in his novel: "It was a goddam shame," thinks the hero, that an American

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The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel

Belletto¹

2015

American Literature

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“I Feel Close to Myself”: Solipsism and US Imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Clarke¹

2013

lit

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This essay addresses the relationship between solipsism (as a theme and formal device) and American imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried . The essay counters an emerging consensus among critics that the solipsistic form of the book reinforces the American imperialism that led to the Vietnam War. Instead, the article contends that the solipsism in O’Brien’s fiction is in fact central to his critique of US imperialism.

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The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies

Shringarpure

2015

JFFP

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This essay mobilizes Fanon as a point of entry into mapping the current state of postcolonial studies, and within that, reflects on what constitutes the postcolonial canon. Over a gradual course of the eighties and nineties, there has come about a transition from the field’s founding moments in which anti-imperialism, tricontinentalism, Third World nationalism and aesthetics of realism and resistance thrived, to the current trends that show a slant toward postmodernist fragmentation, multiculturalism, issues of diaspora, metropolitan narratives as well as a proclivity toward theorizing the field itself. There are many reasons for this: the specific dynamics of the post-Cold War American culture within which these works were received; the compromised relationship between academic and commercial publishing culture, which made a jump from narratives of decolonization and neocolonialism to metropolitan multiculturalism; and the sway of postmodernism over academia as a whole, which led to a disregard for Marxist theories and, more importantly, to a neglect of realism as a mode and aesthetic in postcolonial theory. These factors have worked together to shape how the genealogy of postcolonial studies and its theory have come to be accepted as “obvious.” This has, in turn, had strong repercussions for the kind of literature and theory that have come to be celebrated and canonized within the field. The essay draws on Anthony Alessandrini's Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different (2014) and Neil Lazarus' The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) to offer a reconstructed genealogy of the field of postcolonial studies.

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Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative.

Abstract: Book Reviews 753 pointing but does not significantly mar Hershberger's valuable account of a form of peace movement activity that is often passed over by more conventional treatments of the subject.

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel

The Korean War, the Cold War, and the American Novel

“I Feel Close to Myself”: Solipsism and US Imperialism in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies

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