The Vietnam War was a turning point in American history-our longest war, our
anti-Communist war, the only war we lost-and it has had a great influence on
literature, film and popular culture in the decades since the 1960s. This
course will investigate how the war has been remembered in various artistic
media. It is designed to bring students from the present generation into
closer contact with the legacy of the Vietnam era. We will read fictional
accounts and factual memoirs of the war; most of these books were written by
combatants themselves, and a few of the authors are Vietnamese. We will also
discuss several popular films that depicted the war and contrast them with
other visual images that have become imprinted on our culture's collective
memory, images ranging from wartime photography to the "look" and the
iconography of war memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans' Monument in
Washington. Several class sessions will be devoted to a historical survey of
the war, to provide a context for our readings in fiction and memoir
writing, and students will be asked to do historical research in this course
as well as literary analysis. Likewise, the midterm and final exams will
contain both factual questions and essay-style questions.

While we will do extensive reading in this course, a good deal of our class
time will be devoted to your own writing. Students will write short response
papers to analyze sections of Vietnam era fiction and film. You will also do
historical research for a factual paper on one aspect of the war. For the
final paper, you will have the opportunity to draw on your own memories,
family histories and oral histories to write an account of ways in which the
Vietnam War has come down into your own generation and your decade. Your
goal here will be to deal with some legacies of the Vietnam War in our own
time. The class format will be a combination of lectures, discussions, and
writing and editing sessions conducted with student partners. One of the
main ways in which we will use writing in this course is through "writing to
learn," which means finding out more about the subject in the process of
writing about it. Readings include O'Brien, The Things They Carried; Mason,
In Country; stories by Vietnamese and American writers found in the
collection The Other Side of Heaven; oral history and memoir writing such as
Santoli's, Everything We Had and Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army; and films
including Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Platoon.