Post-traumatic masculinity in American fiction after Vietnam.
Item
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Title
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Post-traumatic masculinity in American fiction after Vietnam.
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Identifier
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AAI3249919
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identifier
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3249919
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Creator
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Lemberg, Jennifer.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Nancy K. Miller
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Date
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2007
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, American | Gender Studies
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Abstract
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Scholars of Vietnam literature have argued that America's self-doubt following the Vietnam War put the heroic models of masculinity formed after World War Two into question. New forms of masculine identity emerged in the wake of this rupture with the past, informed by the establishment in 1980 of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a medical diagnosis. In its association with Vietnam veterans, PTSD authorized the idea that masculinity could be shaped by trauma. Yet the ordeal of the veteran was not the only form of suffering being worked through in America after the war, when public awareness of other historical violence increased dramatically, and many cultural and ethnic groups framed their own post-traumatic narratives. The challenge of reinventing masculine identity in the aftermath of trauma inspired fiction by men of varied backgrounds, so that the effort to define post-traumatic masculinity became a central concern in American fiction.;This dissertation explores that literature and its themes, methods, and strategies through an examination of male-authored fiction published from 1979 to 1999, including James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney, Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Thane Rosenbaum's Second Hand Smoke. Drawing on familiar masculine types---the alienated Indian, the tormented Vietnam veteran, the model minority Asian, and the pathological child of Holocaust survivors---the novels envision protagonists whose identities are constituted by the traumatic memory of war, genocide, and immigration. They perform the cultural work of imagining what Susan Jeffords calls the "remasculinization" of male subjects depicted as having been wounded by trauma. Drawing from recent scholarship on trauma and gender while also attending to the historical and ethnic specificities of each text, my project considers how these works establish the role of trauma in forming personal and collective identity, explore complex masculine identifications with perpetrators and victims, negotiate the feminine in the process of remasculinization, and employ formal structures premised on repeated and obsessive returns to traumatic sites.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.