Dissent as Therapy: the Case of the Veterans of the American War in Vietnam
Most of the fiction that was produced by soldier-writers after the American War in Vietnam has been characterized as therapeutic, with its main objective understood to be healing the wounds caused by the traumatic experience of war. This approach has tended to individualize the experience of particu...
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2015 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universidad de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de la UB |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:diposit.ub.edu:2445/98887 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2445/98887 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Guerra del Vietnam, 1961-1975 Terapèutica Vietnam War, 1961-1975 Therapeutics |
| Sumario: | Most of the fiction that was produced by soldier-writers after the American War in Vietnam has been characterized as therapeutic, with its main objective understood to be healing the wounds caused by the traumatic experience of war. This approach has tended to individualize the experience of particular soldier-writers and to conceive of their fiction as the substitute for psychoanalytic therapy, cancelling, in the same maneuver, its political agency. By emphasizing the individual process of overcoming 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder', the critical work analyzing the production of these authors has, intentionally or not, obscured the larger political project by which these writers were literally putting their bodies on the line. In their physical and psychological fragmentation, those bodies became the locus of the struggle to establish a new definition of national identity, at a time when the concept had become unstable to say the least. The aim of this article is to bring back to the fore of the study of US Vietnam War cultural production its emphasis on the politics of dissent. |
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