Critical approaches to American cultural studies: The Vietnam War in history, literature, and film

This is a theoretical study of the Vietnam War as it has been represented in American history, literature, and film. It argues that the Vietnam War constitutes a cultural crisis which continues to permeate American life, analyzing a range of textual practices in order to suggest how popular culture has attempted to deal with a crisis that was never resolved in the jungles of Vietnam, any more than it was resolved by the American political system.;The first chapter turns to the discipline of American Studies so as to locate a potential source for historical and cultural explanation. Although it highlights crucial issues raised in debates over the Americanist movement, it argues that American Studies remains caught within a theoretical blind-spot, given its unwillingness to engage with contemporary marxist criticism. The second chapter therefore proposes an approach to the study of American culture which draws upon the recent work of such theorists as Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and others.;Chapter three turns to different kinds of textual practices which have dealt with the changing effects of the Vietnam War in American Culture. The writings of intellectuals and professional historians, as well as the novels of Vietnam veterans, are analyzed for the ways in which they construct the War as a domestic and foreign policy issue, and as a problem in lived experience. Although this chapter distinguishes between the writings of intellectuals and veterans, it makes no rigid distinctions between intellectual and creative processes of analysis and representation.;While the third chapter focuses on efforts to rewrite the War, the fourth and final chapter analyzes Hollywood's attempt to represent the war. Through an analysis of several films, spanning the 1960s to the 1980s, this chapter suggests how the Vietnam War has been recreated and reimagined in popular cinematic practices. Although the Vietnam War clearly remains an ideological problematic in America culture, this study concludes by arguing that the most recent representations of the War--especially on television--do not merely reflect the dominant ideology, but instead provide symbolic, and therefore highly loaded, resolutions to real political and social problems.