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SUMMER 2016
English 541 (American Literature Since 1890)
Michael Zeitlin
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: Narrative Perspectives on the American--and Canadian-Counter-Insurgency Wars
As Fanon observed of the Algerian War in 1961, "the recruits dispatched from the métropole are
not always sent of their own free will and in some cases even are sickened by this war" (The
Wretched of the Earth). This was also true of the counter-insurgency wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and
Afghanistan. In this seminar we will read the soldiers’ testimonies in stories, novels, memoirs,
reports, and transcribed oral histories. We’ll also engage narrative accounts produced by
doctors, nurses, reporters, prisoners, civilians, and “detainees.” This material will enable us to
deepen our understanding of the genealogy of an unfolding catastrophe, the long patterns of
compulsive repetition that extend from the war in Vietnam through the wars in the Persian Gulf,
Iraq, Afghanistan and, now, Syria and beyond: the violent collision of Western "innocence" with
uncanny and opaque cultures and geographies; the spectacle of national ideologies dumbfounded
by slow-motion military and political defeat.
Readings will be selected from the following outline (the final list will be available in May):
Ideological Origins, the Political Unconscious, Vietnam
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Main-street” (1852)
Graham Green, The Quiet American (1955)
Lederer and Burdick, The Ugly American (1958)
Don DeLillo, End Zone (1972)
Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977)
Wallace Terry, ed. Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War (1985)
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried (1990)
Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn (2010)
The Persian Gulf War
Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2003)
Alex Vernon, The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War (1999)
Iraq
Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (2005) http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (2012)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012)
Phil Klay, Redeployment (2014)
David Finkel, The Good Soldiers (2009)
SUMMER SESSION 2016
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Afghanistan
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (2008)
Christie Blatchford, Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death From Inside
the New Canadian Army (2008)
Kevin Patterson, M.D. and Jane Warren, Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the
Words of Its Participants. Foreword by LGEN Roméo Dallaire (2007)
Graeme Smith, The Dogs are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (2013)
Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War
Through Afghan Eyes (2014)
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary. Ed. Larry Siems (2015)
Combat Medicine
John A. Parrish, M.D., 12, 20 &5: A Doctor's Year in Vietnam (1972)
Keith Walker, ed., A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six American Women
Who
Served in Vietnam (1985)
Henry Hamilton, M.D., Phan Rang Chronicles: A British Surgeon in Vietnam, September,
1966-May, 1968 (2007)
Ronald J. Glasser, M.D., Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq (2006)
Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars--The Untold
Story (2013)
David Finkel, Thank You for your Service. (2013)
A course packet will also include selections from the following:
Freud: “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” (1914), Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920)
Lacan: “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (1948)
Baudrillard: The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991)
Zizek: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002)
Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (2005)
Fanon, “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” [from The Wretched of the Earth] (1961)
Bercuson and Granatstein, “Lessons Learned? What Canada Should Learn From Afghanistan”
(2011)
Joan Didion, “Letter from Paradise, 21° 19' N., 157° 52' W” (1966)
Nessen, Shawn Christian, DO, FACS, LTC, MC, US Army, Dave Edmond Lounsbury, MD,
FACP, COL, MC, US Army (Retired), and Stephen P. Hetz, MD, FACP, COL, MC, US Army
(Retired), eds. War Surgery in Afghanistan and Iraq: A Series of Cases, 2003-2007 (2008)
SUMMER SESSION 2016