Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam

Aleksandra Musiał is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. She is the author of articles on the American war in Vietnam and American representations of World War II, and the co-editor, with Justyna Jajszczok, of The Body in History, Culture, and the Arts (Routledge 2019).

• Introduction: Secret HistoriesChapter 1: Vietnam SyndromesChapter 2: Myth and Representations of the Vietnamese LandscapeChapter 3: Representations of the Victims of "Vietnam"Conclusion: Don’t Support the Troops

"In this well-researched and engagingly written book, Aleksandra Musial weaves an indispensable narrative of a nation’s wasted learning opportunity. Exploring the canon of multigeneric American texts on Vietnam – or rather “Vietnam” – the author reveals the erasures of historical context and other obfuscations which gave rise to the paradoxical construction of the US as the main victim of its own atrocities. A timely and courageous investigation of large-scale self-mythologizing, this is an urgent call to rethink a major historical event for the benefits of a post-heroic age."Krzysztof Majer, scholar of North American literature at the University of Lódz and Polish translator of Michael Herr’s Dispatches"In a clear, jargon-free prose, Aleksandra Musial dissects the rhetorical strategies through which the Myth of the Vietnam War was constructed, and aggressors turned into victims. Moving deftly between history and literature, Musial offers a definitive debunking of constructions of the war as an American tragedy."Giorgio Mariani, author of Waging War: Peacefighting in American Literature"Over forty years later, the Vietnam War continues to loom large in American cultural narratives. Victimhood in American Narratives of the War in Vietnam explains how this war that devastated Vietnam and split the American public came to be mythologized and depoliticized in such a way that it has been uniquely available for U.S. leaders of both political parties to bolster support for subsequent military action."Gina Weaver Yount, Associate Professor at Southern Nazarene University