EL 19 (1H): Special Topics in Writing: Writing Vietnam
Spring 1999

Professor: Beth Taylor

"There were many Vietnams." By reading varied genres responding to the experience of the war in Vietnam, we will study how any experience is multitudinous, and how genres manipulate experience in different ways. You will respond to writers of the war and to your own experiences -- including, possibly, the legacy of Vietnam in your own lives -- through memoir, fiction, poetry, biography, and oral history. This course is for advanced writers.

Required Texts

  1. Journals (notebook and computer file)
  2. The Vietnam Reader, ed. Stewart O'Nan
  3. From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath, ed. Phillip Mahony
  4. Visions of War, Dreams of Peace: Writings of Women in the Vietnam War, ed. Linda Van Devanter
  5. Touched by the Dragon, by Frank Gryzb
  6. Shrapnel in the Heart, by Laura Palmer
  7. The Sorrow of War, by Bao Ninh
  8. South Wind Changing, by Jade Ngoc Huynh

Supplemental Material

  1. Laura Palmer, "Leaving Saigon," Rolling Stone Magazine, June 5, 1975, p 26-33.
  2. Laura Palmer, "How to Bandage a War," The New York Times Magazine, November 7, 1993.
  3. Tim O'Brien, "The Vietnam in Me." The New York Times Magazine, October 2, 1994, p 48-57.
  4. Norman Boucher, "The Long Way Home: The Story of Kathy Le' '97 and Phuc Le '97," Brown Alumni Monthly, May 1997, p 23-31. (link to BAM)

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