Suchergebnisse

The books discussed here deal directly with wartime action. Other fiction deals with veterans and their suffering (Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers , National Book Award, 1975), the effects of the war on families (Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country , 1985), living and working in Vietnam before the war (Ward Just's A Dangerous Friend , 1999) and re-interpretations of our involvement (Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke , National Book Award, 2007). They take account of a broader context and are not limited to the battlefield. If you are interested in how Vietnam was considered later on, they are important reading. Johnson's book, however, is a tricky one. Aimed at capturing the miasma of lies, half-truths, and fantasy in which the United States was mired, it creates puzzles within puzzles. Johnson is an accomplished writer, but it's difficult to penetrate the forest of "smoke." Writing about confusion should not itself be so confusing.

Reviews thirty years of novels & memoirs on the Vietnam War. D. Edelman

Last year, during the battle for the Democratic Party nomination, the rivals tried to keep both race and gender out of the campaign. After the conventions, with the entrance of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin into the mix, the conversation was bound to change. At this writing in early fall, we couldn't know how American voters would feel about an African American president, but we had a little more information about their response to a woman candidate for the executive branch. Palin touched a chord across the country. She's a "hockey Mom," a pit bull with lipstick, a "regular gal," and a woman with a family scene familiar to many Americans. A lot of voters identified with her: her political brashness and success, her right-wing views, and her domestic story. But how do Americans feel about a woman in the top job? Barack Obama's contest with Hillary Clinton was a battle for the presidential nomination in one party, and the more liberal one at that. And even in that party there was plenty of anti-feminism during the primary contest. Maybe Americans can only make an exception for a female candidate who stands on the reactionary edge of our politics. But we still may not know what America thinks about a woman as president.

Draws on popular culture in the form of two movies & a TV series to shed light on the US psyche when it comes to presidential politics & the prospect of a female president. Critical analyses of the films Kisses for My President (1964) & The Contender (2000), & the TV series Commander in Chief (2005/06) are provided, asserting that each casts women as inappropriate for the presidency. These portrayals are briefly set against what is termed the far more comfortable depiction of the male president in the series The West Wing, & it is concluded that the female portrayals spring from worn out cliches & evince nothing of the creativity required to present a genuine picture of the world of a female president. Adapted from the source document.

How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don't have a "big bang" theory for the "second wave" of the women's movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when women who were active in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s took a good, long look at their radical male comrades and began to question their own subservience. "We do everything they do," they thought, "organizing, writing leaflets, marching, demonstrating—and then they think we should do the laundry? What's that about?" They wondered why they weren't running the show. But the roots of the movement go back even earlier. Again, popular opinion tells us that there was a buildup for some time, at least since the time of the Second World War, when women had to pitch in and were needed for essential work in the "outside" world.

Revisits the importance of four books published in the late 1970s that sought to reappraise women authors & their literary output: (1) Patricia Spack's (1975) The Female Imagination; (2) Ellen Moers's (1976) Literary Women; (3) Elaine Showalter's (1977) A Literature of Their Own; & (4) Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar's (1979) The Madwoman in the Attic. The impetus for these critical works is located in early feminist books that also addressed literary subjects: Mary Ellman's (1968) Thinking about Women & Kate Millett's (1970) Sexual Politics. The impact of all these works on establishing women's literature as a valid literary & cultural enterprise is discussed. K. Hyatt Stewart