Gothic Resistances: Flesh, Bones, Ghosts and Time in Vietnamese Postwar Fiction

In contrast to the thousands of critical studies of American writing on the Vietnam War, there has been a relative dearth of English-language appraisals of Vietnamese literature of the American War (as it is known in Vietnam). This disparity in understanding partly informs anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s distinction between “the idiom of ghost” often used in American memories of the war and the widespread public belief in war ghosts in Vietnam, whose war dead numbered approximately fifty times that of the American military forces, and whose citizens continued to suffer long after the war due to the most extensive bombing and chemical weapons campaigns in the history of humankind.This paper explores novels (by Bao Ninh and Duong Thu Huong) and short stories by (Le Minh Khue, Ho Anh Thai, Ngo Tu Lap and Phan Hy Dong) from the rich wave of Vietnamese postwar fiction which began to be published and translated in the early 1990s. Through close readings of these works, this study will analyse how local customs of the dead combine with Gothic forms and features – flesh, bones, ghosts and time – to create fictional and memorial resistances to myths and ideologies which have sought to cast the war in more traditional tropes of nationalism and heroism.

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THE PROBLEM OF TYPOLOGY IN CHINESE ARCHAEOLOGY

Early China ◽

10.1017/eac.2015.18 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 39 ◽

pp. 21-52 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

Anke Hein

Keyword(s):

English Language ◽

Archaeological Research ◽

Future Directions ◽

Chinese Archaeology ◽

Archaeological Method And Theory ◽

Archaeological Work ◽

History Of ◽

Archaeological Method ◽

The Rich

AbstractChinese and Western archaeologists (especially those of the anthropologically-oriented tradition) often seem to be talking past each other, not only because they are publishing in different languages, but also because of differences in theory and method. While most of the major theoretical works in Western languages are by now available in Chinese translations, hardly any English-language publications exist that explain Chinese approaches to archaeological method and theory. This article helps to bridge the gap by introducing the history of debates on archaeological method in China to a Western audience, focusing particularly on issues of typology and classification. Discussing in detail the merits—and issues—of approaches suggested by four of the most influential Chinese archaeologists (Li Chi, Xia Nai, Su Bingqi, and K. C. Chang), this article provides a deeper understanding of the preconditions of archaeological research in China. It also suggests future directions for archaeological work by local and foreign archaeologists, including but also going beyond the classification of the rich body of artifacts coming to light in Chinese excavations.

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From the Green of Vietnam to Toes Painted with Nirvana

Boom A Journal of California ◽

10.1525/boom.2016.6.4.10 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 6 (4) ◽

pp. 10-15

Author(s):

Susan Straight

Keyword(s):

Vietnam War ◽

American Military ◽

Vietnamese Women ◽

The Us ◽

History Of ◽

The Vietnam War ◽

Nail Salons

Thousands of women who survived the Vietnam War, whose husbands were sent to reeducation camps after working with American military, now live in the US, where nail salons anchor almost every strip mall and flourish inside luxury malls as well. The history of how Vietnamese women came to work in the nail industry and how Americans became accustomed to manicures and pedicures is entwined with the loss of home and landscape.

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Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley in Good Housekeeping Magazine

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474461085.003.0010 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 187-207

Author(s):

Saskia McCracken

Keyword(s):

Short Stories ◽

Short Story ◽

Virginia Woolf ◽

Aldous Huxley ◽

House Of Commons ◽

Oxford Street ◽

History Of ◽

Good Housekeeping ◽

The Rich ◽

Women's Magazine

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short story. Woolf’s series takes her readers on a tour of the sites of commerce and power in London, from the Thames docks and shops of Oxford Street, to ‘Great Men’s Houses,’ abbeys, cathedrals, and the House of Commons, ending with a ‘Portrait’ of a fictitious Londoner. This chapter has three aims. First, it suggests that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping publications can be read not simply as five essays and a short story, but, considering Woolf’s ethics of the short story, as a series of short stories or, as the magazine editors introduced them, word pictures and scenes. Secondly, this chapter argues that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping series responds to, and resists the Stalinist politics of, Aldous Huxley’s series of four highbrow essays on England, published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine. Finally, this chapter analyses a critically neglected short story by Ambrose O’Neill, ‘The Astounding History of Albert Orange’ (February 1932), published in Good Housekeeping, which features both Woolf and Huxley as characters, and which critiques, satirises, and destabilises the boundaries of highbrow literary culture. Thus, the focus turns from highbrow writers’ short stories to a story about highbrow writing, all published in the supposedly middlebrow Good Housekeeping, demonstrating the rich complexity of the magazine, its varied politics, and its generically hybrid publications.

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ARTISTIC AND CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS OF THE FICTION WORK OF ANGARAY

Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities ◽

10.46568/jssh.v58i1.138 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 58 (1) ◽

pp. 191-197

Author(s):

Muhammad Sajid Khan

Keyword(s):

Short Stories ◽

Social Issues ◽

Young Generation ◽

Reading Habits ◽

Cultural Traditions ◽

Urdu Literature ◽

Fiction Writers ◽

Subsequent Publication ◽

History Of ◽

The Rich

Reading habits among young generation is going to declining and culture of reading books is modified to modern methods of communication like browsing social sites and internet, playing on cell phones and watching T.V. This era modernization has taken away the youth from reading habits. It is important that the young generation learns about the rich Urdu literature including Urdu fiction in which several writers have significantly contributed. The emergence of Urdu literature facilitated the expansion of Urdu language. Fiction writers try to indicate important weaknesses of the society, cultural traditions, and norms, so as to find out the solutions to these issues. There were so many fictional works in Urdu literature having done during the progressive and independent movement. “ANGARAY” is a collection of fictional short stories authored by four young writers who had a progressive approach and tried in their own way to bring forth several social issues through their work at the time British India. This paper attempts to present a brief history of this collection and the consequences emerging out of its publication at that time. The study is reviewed and analyzed the criticism on selected short stories of subsequent publication. The study found that the readers would find the ideas and views of the four writers in the present time may provide them some relief from the opposition they faced on publication of their work.

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‘Only Religions Count in Vietnam’: Thich Tri Quang and the Vietnam War

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x07002855 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 42 (4) ◽

pp. 751-782 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

JAMES McALLISTER

Keyword(s):

Vietnam War ◽

Religious Leader ◽

Johnson Administration ◽

American Military ◽

Military Regimes ◽

History Of ◽

The Vietnam War ◽

The Right ◽

North Vietnam ◽

The Military

AbstractThich Tri Quang has long been one of the most controversial actors in the history of the Vietnam War. Scholars on the right have argued that Tri Quang was in all likelihood a communist agent operating at the behest of Hanoi. Scholars on the left have argued that Tri Quang was a peaceful religious leader devoted to democracy and a rapid end to the war. This article argues that neither of these interpretations is persuasive. As American officials rightly concluded throughout the war, there was no compelling evidence to suggest that Tri Quang was a communist agent or in any way sympathetic to the goals of Hanoi or the NLF. Drawing on the extensive archival evidence of Tri Quang's conversations with American officials, it is apparent that Tri Quang was in fact strongly anti-communist and quite receptive to the use of American military power against North Vietnam and China. The main factor that led to conflict between the Buddhist movement and the Johnson administration was Tri Quang's insistence that the military regimes that followed Ngo Dinh Diem were hostile to Buddhism and incapable of leading the struggle against Communism to a successful conclusion.

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Takes on intelligence and the Vietnam war: Review of "Vietnam: The history of an unwinnable war, 1945-1975;" "Why Vietnam matters: An eyewitness account of lessons not learned;" and "This time we win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive"

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e741172011-007 ◽

2011 ◽

Author(s):

Clayton Laurie

Keyword(s):

Vietnam War ◽

History Of ◽

The Vietnam War ◽

Eyewitness Account ◽

Tet Offensive

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A Qualified Assertion Database for the History of Places

International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing ◽

10.3366/ijhac.2019.0233 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (1-2) ◽

pp. 95-115

Author(s):

Brandon Plewe

Keyword(s):

Data Model ◽

Temporal Change ◽

Religious Congregations ◽

Historical Gis ◽

The Past ◽

Model Based ◽

Complex Information ◽

Invaluable Tool ◽

History Of ◽

The Rich

Historical place databases can be an invaluable tool for capturing the rich meaning of past places. However, this richness presents obstacles to success: the daunting need to simultaneously represent complex information such as temporal change, uncertainty, relationships, and thorough sourcing has been an obstacle to historical GIS in the past. The Qualified Assertion Model developed in this paper can represent a variety of historical complexities using a single, simple, flexible data model based on a) documenting assertions of the past world rather than claiming to know the exact truth, and b) qualifying the scope, provenance, quality, and syntactics of those assertions. This model was successfully implemented in a production-strength historical gazetteer of religious congregations, demonstrating its effectiveness and some challenges.

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Conclusion

10.23943/princeton/9780691167787.003.0008 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Winter

Keyword(s):

Middle Eastern ◽

Rich Diversity ◽

The Social ◽

Local Contexts ◽

History Of ◽

Religious Oppression ◽

The Rich ◽

To Come

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

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Divination and Human Nature

10.23943/princeton/9780691169392.001.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Peter T. Struck

Keyword(s):

Human Nature ◽

Classical Antiquity ◽

History Of ◽

The Rich ◽

New Perspective ◽

Observable Fact

This book casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. The book reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the book demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, the book notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, this book illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

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