American literary response to the war in Vietnam.

Using a representative sample of the literature, both fiction and nonfiction, written by former American soldiers and correspondents between the years 1969 and 1981, this study analyzes the literary responses of those Americans most intimately involved in the Vietnam wax. Viewed collectively, these commentaries offer insights into the war that take us beyond its surface history and tend to refute the emerging apologist interpretation. Like the current historical analyses, their central concern is the war's morality and its connection to our national self-concept. They approach the issue, however, from the complex perspective of the writer/participant vividly recreating the actual experience on one level; probing, however unconsciously, its complex moral and metaphysical issues on another. Ultimately this literature is a powerful attack not only on the war in Vietnam but also on the American myths of innocence and mission which underlay it.Chapter one defines some of the major component of the cultural myths that shaped the idealized vision of America that these accounts bring into question. It defines the word myth in a cultural and historical context and examines three revealing works on American culture: R. W. B. Lewis' The American Adam, Ernest Lee Tuveson's Redeemer Nation, and Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden. In a further attempt to elucidate this cultural mythology, chapter two examines Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.Analyzing content and form, chapters three, four, and five turn to the accounts written by the war's participants and observers. Using selected nonfiction accounts of the war that deal with the reactions of myriad participants and observers--Gloria Emerson's Winners and Losers, Michael Herr's Dispatches, Mark Baker's Nam, and Al Santoli's Everything We Had--chapter three defines and documents this war's wound. Chapter four analyzes two fictional accounts of the war, Gustav Hasford's The Short-Timers and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and examines their relationship to the themes and techniques used by classic American writers to probe the underside of the American experience. Chapter five examines Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July and Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato, which attempt to move beyond the war's disillusionment to a "wise accommodation."Thesis (Ph. D.