Soldier Talk: The Vietnam Way in Oral Narrative

by Michael Zeitlin, Paul Budra

Overview

Soldier Talk is a collection of essays about the Vietnam combat veteran and his representation of his experience. The Vietnam War created a vast archive of recorded accounts of the war, permitting an unprecedented opportunity to confront its brutal secrets. This book is about how to read and how to hear the historical, psychological, and narrative truths of soldiers’ talk. The ten chapters explore the phenomenon of soldier talk; the oral narrative form of so much of the Vietnam War literature; the collection of veteran interviews published under the title Nam; Vietnam War poetry; the strange tale of Bobby Garwood, the private who disappeared 10 days before he was to return home and surfaced 13 years later in Hanoi; Vietnam oral history and revolutionary socialism; the historiography of the Vietnam War; "queering Vietnam"; the African American experience of Vietnam; and women and the war. Along the way the authors touch on most of the best-known and most important writing to come out of the war.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253344335
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	06/28/2004
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.85(d)

About the Author

Michael Zeitlin is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and has written extensively about Faulkner and about postmodern literature.

Paul Budra is Associate Professor of English at Simon Fraser University and author of A Mirror for Magistrates and the de casibus Tradition: The Mental and Cultural World of Tudor and Stuart England and Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Soldier Talk
Michael Zeitlin and Paul Budra
2. Approaching a Truer Form of Truth: The Appropriation of the Oral Narrative Form in Vietnam War Literature
Jen Dunnaway
3. Concatenation and History in Nam
Paul Budra
4. "Disremembering, dísmémbering": Poetics and the Oral Histories of the Vietnam War
Kevin McGuirk
5. Talk, Write, Talk-Bobby Garwood, MIAs, and Conspiracy
Craig Howes
6. Resolutely Other: The Vietnam War, Oral History, and the Subject of Revolutionary Socialism
Thomas Carmichael
7. Oral History and Popular Memory in the Historiography of the Vietnam War
Van Nguyen-Marshall
8. Queering Vietnam: Katherine V. Forrest's Fictional Oral History
Priscilla L. Walton
9. Bloods: Teaching the Afroamerican Experience of the Vietnam Conflict
William M. King
10. The Things They Saw: Trauma and Vision in A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women Who Served in Vietnam
Michael Zeitlin
Index
Contributors