20th century american history
20th century american literature
20th century american military conflict
a r flowers
A01=Milton J. Bates
american conflict
american military
american social crisis
Author_Milton J. Bates
Category=DSBH
Category=JBCC9
class difference
donald pfarrer
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
francis ford coppola
freud
frontier ideology
geertz
generational difference
jameson
marx
michael herr
north vietnam
oliver stone
philip caputo
political perspective
politico poetics
racial difference
sex and gender
susan sontag
tim obrien
vietnam war
war literature
war stories
Product details
- ISBN 9780520204331
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Nov 1996
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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What Americans refer to as the Vietnam War embraces much more than the conflict with North Vietnam. Milton J. Bates considers the other conflicts that Americans brought to that war: the divisions stemming from differences in race, class, sex, generation, and frontier ideology. In exploring the rich vein of writing and film that emerged from the Vietnam War era, he strikingly illuminates how these stories reflect American social crises of the period. Some material examined here is familiar, including the work of Michael Herr, Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, Susan Sontag, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone. Other material is less well known - Neverlight by Donald Pfarrer and De Mojo Blues by A. R. Flowers, for example. Bates also draws upon an impressive range of secondary readings, from Freud and Marx to Geertz and Jameson. As the products of a culture in conflict, Vietnam memoirs, novels, films, plays, and poems embody a range of political perspectives, not only in their content but also in their structure and rhetoric. In his final chapter, Bates outlines a 'politico-poetics' of the war story as a genre.
Here he gives special attention to our motives - from the deeply personal to the broadly cultural - for telling war stories.
Milton J. Bates is Professor of English at Marquette University. He is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (California, 1985) and the editor of Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens' Commonplace Book (1989) and Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose by Wallace Stevens (1989).
