| Literary texts about the Vietnam War, authored by Americans as well as North Vietnamese, I argue, pose distinct interpretative problems to the reader. This dissertation investigates various Vietnam War---themed texts-novels, drama, and film---to locate and analyze issues contained within these texts and to suggest possible ways to interpret them. The "postmodern" is, according to some theorists, both an historical moment and an aesthetic movement. As such, my investigation analyzes discursive enactments of postmodernity located within these texts as well as postmodern features of the larger cultural moment that these texts allude to. Also contained within the label of "postmodernism," however, is its antithesis and supplement, modernism. Thus, I also address the differing concerns of the modernism and postmodernism by contrasting two influential modern texts about World War II with two postmodern texts about the Vietnam War.; Emerging in the aftermath of a "real" event and authored often by "participants" of the Vietnam War, these postmodern texts can be interpreted as both responses to and "re"-constructions of a historical moment. However, because the idea of language as a vehicle to consensus and truth has been destabilized by postmodern theorists, my analysis addresses both this postmodern distrust of language as well as points out this same skepticism purveyed by many of the authors of Vietnam War literature. I also examine other concerns of postmodernity---globalism, the death of History and other "grand recits;" the fragmentation of self and identity; and the various technological apparatuses that help to define the postmodern moment.; Lastly, I examine the differences and overlap between postmodern and postcolonial theories to investigate whether texts authored by North Vietnamese participants of the Vietnam War should be considered "postmodern," "postcolonial," or a synthesis of both. I conclude that these texts require equal amounts of both: awareness that postmodernism is a cultural dominant for these North Vietnamese authors but that their lived histories and national identities also require sensitivity to local customs, economics, and politics. |
