American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

William V. Spanos is Distinguished Professor of English at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He is the author of many books, including America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire and Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction.

• PrefaceAcknowledgments1. History and Its Specter: Rethinking Thinking in the Post-Cold War Age2. Althusser’s "Problematic": Vision and the Vietnam War3. Who Killed Alden Pyle?: The Oversight of Oversight in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American4. Retrieving the Thisness of the Vietnam War: A Symptomatic Reading of Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War5. "The Land Is Your Enemy": Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato6. American Exceptionalism, the Jeremiad, and the Frontier, Before and After 9/11: From the Puritans to the Neo-Con Men7. Conclusion: The Vietnam War, 9/11, and Its AftermathNotesIndex

"The writers William V. Spanos chooses to study in American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization … are noteworthy today for characterizing the U.S. intervention as a darkly brutal affair." — American Literary Scholarship"In this fascinating and important book, distinguished scholar William V. Spanos uses his Heideggerian perspective to explain why we Americans have suppressed memory of the catastrophe of Vietnam and why we are now in the midst of repeating that error in a new form in Iraq. Spanos explains how American exceptionalism led us as a nation to believe that we had an 'errand in the wilderness' and a manifest destiny to take over the continent, and, more recently, to believe that it is our calling to 'bring Western-style democracy to the world.'" — J. Hillis Miller, author of Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James"This book will become an important voice in the ongoing debate about American identity and the United States' place in the world of the twenty-first century." — Rodney Mader, West Chester University of Pennsylvania