Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / English Dept. Includes bibliographical references. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Please note: creative writing theses are permanently embargoed in OpenBU. No public access is forecasted for these. To request private access, please click on the locked Download file link and fill out the appropriate web form. / Anyone who tries to tell a conventional story about an unconventional war is a damned liar. Shrapnel is an experimental novel structurally designed to reflect the distance, despair, and rage felt by a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The author of this work, Andrew M. Swanson, is a veteran of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and has served in the prestigious 173rd and 82nd Airborne as an infantry paratrooper between 2000 and 2006.

Despite the fact that many countries participated in the Vietnam War, their war stories tend to marginalize one another. In this study, I use a transnationalist critical lens to compare the ethnocentric stories of the U.S. and South Korea. Instead of presenting transnationalism as a focus on the changes that arise through travel between different cultures, I rely on another meaning of transnationalism as a form of consciousness. In order to compare differing perspectives on the Vietnam War as represented in the U.S. and South Korea, I compare Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods and Suk-Yong Hwang’s The Shadow of Arms, based on the writing style of the texts, the shared theme of friendly fire, and representation of the My Lai massacre. As a result, this comparison challenges readers in each nation to recognize perspectives on the Vietnam War which they may have missed.

Tim O'Brien, a contemporary author writing mostly about his combat experience in Vietnam, has written eight books to date. All involve Vietnam in some way—overtly, for the most part. He and his stories are well known stylistically for several traits including the blurred distinctions between what actually happened and "story truth," something that did not really happen, but is true nonetheless. Within the story, he also blurs the line between what actually happens and what is imagined by the narrator or one of the characters; and, although he sometimes makes the distinction, he often does not. To help shed some light on this, there are a number of published interviews and articles wherein he discusses the themes, forms, and methods of his writing as well as his experiences. Research and analysis of O'Brien and his works show that, although his stories overtly deal with a myriad of other issues and themes, the complex and specific theme of displacement caused by trauma is present in all of his work, and can even be considered the engine that drives his stories and how they work with the reader. Additionally, O'Brien's well-known method of writing is actually a subtle yet intensely effective performance and enactment of this underlying theme of displacement. When used as a reading strategy, the theme itself clarifies and unlocks several points of contention about his texts such as O'Brien's generally negative treatment of women. / Master of Arts

The inability of language to convey complete meaning and truth is a central point of address for much post-structuralist literary theory and criticism. When these theories are applied to a first-person narrative structure, whether it is a work of fiction or non-fiction, certain specific incongruities arise. When a narrative seeks to recall certain events, a presupposed reexamination takes place as the narrative unfolds text comes into being. If a narractice is contructed in this way then the intent of the text then is to convey comprehensive meanings or truths of those cataloged experiences. According Deconstructive Theory, it is language's inherent nature to resist ultimate meaning. This focus on the articulation of truth is futile because meaning, like language, is always already in a state of fragmentation. This project explores five individual works from different literary traditions-ranging from the canonical to the relatively obscure. The works exhibit various approaches to articulation; including varying degrees of self-definition, personal fiction, and narrative movement toward inarticulation.

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The Vietnam War has become an important symbol and signifier in contemporary American culture and politics. The word "Vietnam" contains many meanings and narratives, including both the real events of the American War in Vietnam and the fictional representations of that war. Because we live in a reality that is composed of both lived experience and simulacra, defined by Baudrillard as a hyperreality, fiction and simulation are capable of representing particular realities. Vietnam was shaped by simulacra of Vietnam itself as well as simulacra of previous American conflicts, especially World War II; however, the hyperreality of Vietnam differed largely from that of World War II. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried are highly fictionalized texts that accurately portray particular realities of Vietnam. These texts are capable of presenting truth about Vietnam through their use of specific metafictional techniques, which continually remind readers and viewers that the story being told is not reality but a story. By emphasizing the fictional elements of their narratives, Apocalypse Now and The Things They Carried point to the constructed nature of reality and empower readers to recognize the possibility of truth in different, even conflicting, narratives.