English students in undergrad, grad, or working on phd, what

>>8814165
>vietnam war literature
waste of time, completely passe.

>>8814337
mostly hoping to land a professorship where I can teach american culture studies courses on that topic

>>8814387
post a mock course title and syllabus

>>8814409
ruff first draft

UNIT ONE - Gaining an Understanding of the Vietnam War
Week 1: Introduction to Vietnam War literature and war studies
-some articles on the vietnam war I haven't decided on yet

Week 2: Early Appearances of the United States in Vietnam
Readings: Graham Greene - The Quiet American 63--114

Week 3: War Journalism
selections from Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War
Half of Michael Herr's Dispatches

Week 4: Word Salad, Montage and Hallucinogenic Feelings in Vietnam
Readings:
Finish up Dispatches
first half of Laotian Fragments - James Clark Pratt

Week Five: Shrapnel, Fragments, and Bombing
Finish up Laotian Fragments
selections from Sven Lvndqvist - A History of Bombing on Vietnam

UNIT TWO
Week Six: The 'Burdens' of Soldiers - Reading Vietnam through Logistics and Items
Readings - Tim O' Brien's The Things they Carried

Week seven: Psychological Burdens and war guilt
Readings: Sam Gaylord - Then I came Home

Week Eight: The Alternative Perspective Part one
Robin Moore - The Green Berets first half

Week Nine: The Alternative Perspective part two - the Vietnam war as right and just
Finish up the Green Berets

UNIT THREE: Race and Gender in the Vietnam War
Week Ten - The Black Soldier in Vietnam
Selections from Bloods by Terry Wallace

Week Eleven: Continued discussions on race through poetry
Readings:
Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa

Selections from Huynh Sanh Thong (ed.), An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems From The Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries

Week Twelve: Role of Women in the Vietnam War
Readings:
Joan Didion - Democracy

Week Thirteen: The Vietnamese Perspective
Readings:Bao Ninh - The Sorrow of War

UNIT FOUR: Mapping Vietnam
Week Fourteen: Vietnam and Jungles
Readings: Tim O' Brien's Going after Cacciato - first half

Week Fifteen: Geometry and Tactical Navigating in Vietnam
Readings: Finish up Going after Cacciato, Selections from Meditations in Green - Stephen Wright


this is late night, very rough draft me-drinking and smoking syllabus. I will design way better in the future. its kinda organized thematically

>>8814543
Why do you feel like it's important for someone to know this shit?

>>8814543
>no It Ain't Me by CCR

>>8814603
History in general, how our views on war changed radically during this time period, how that in turn has reflected itself in social movements and protests in places like University, the workplace, government, social settings, etc.

The content is just another lens through which to view the development of the world.

>>8814165
Irish literature around the era of the 1916 rebellion from both perspectives of the conflict.

>>8814543
Looks pretty cool to me.

>>8814543
>Tim O' Brien's Going after Cacciato
Is this any good, OP? Would you recommend reading The Things They Carried first?

>>8815012
I read The Things They Carried first in high school and I still love it so sure I'm biased and I'd recommend that first but going after cacciato is just as powerful

>>8814165
i dunno. I'm finishing my undergrad now and about to move into my masters. I'm dreading the moment of choosing specialization. i don't really give a shit about literature; i view it as a convenient testing ground or laboratory experiment in philosophy and theory, my real love. but it's too late, i feel, to jump ship.

>>8814165
My broad specialization is Japanese literature, specifically Taisho and late Meiji.

Areas I work on are genre studies, reception history, book history and literary awards at those times.

>>8814165
I'm doing my dissertation on Shelley and the Hellenistic ideal.

>>8814165
>Masters thesis on Vietnam War literature

How particular, idiosyncratic, and boring. How do you honestly care that much about something so particular and limited in relevance to a very specific historical and cultural context. Not trying to talk shit, I'm sure you're a fairly intelligent individual. It just seems like something that not really that intellectually deep or universal.

I'm going to grad school for cognitive science (my work is very linguistically and logically oriented, I studied math and philosophy for my undergrad), so obviously I probably have rather different interests from you. Now not that I'd ever major in literature or anything like that, but if I did I'd probably do work on literary criticism with a strong slant, so to speak, toward philosophy of language and epistemology. Of course I shouldn't assume that everyone shares my interests and priorities, but don't you think that working on something like literary criticism is a little deeper and more relevant to the human condition. Like I can't imagine reading tones of books on the Vietnam War by almost exclusively American authors and pouring over tedious accounts of combat or the cultural affects of the Vietnam War would be more interesting than studying the work of say Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg Gadamer, Mikhail Bahktin, the Russian Formalists, the New Critics, the post-structuralists, etc.

tl;dr wouldn't something like literary criticism and philosophy (maybe a lil bit of narratology) be more interesting than studying the minutiae of the relationship between the Vietnam War and (pretty much just American) literature.

bumparooski

>>8814608
Do you mean Fortunate Son

>>8816201
Sorry to burst your bubble, but cultural studies/poetics are equally valid lens for the study in literature. Living in the vacuum of theory-land exclusively, without any application of theories to concrete texts/cultural moments is basically intellectual masturbation.

>>8814543
Bao Ninh's The Sorrow Of War is my favourite book ever. Would recommend to all.

>>8817299

Hello, reddit! Enjoying your first day on 4chan?

>>8817299
no, he obviously means It Ain't Me. what are you, stupid?

GOOOOOOOOD MORRRRNING VIETNAAAAAAAAM

>>8817408
He's right though. Theory is the only way to make a "name" for yourself in academia. That said, you will not get a tenure track job out of grad school if all you do is theory.

>>8814543
>It ain't me starts playing

>>8817886>>8817903
I don't understand. The song is titled "Fortunate Son"

>>8818442
I'm looking at the liner notes right now and you're wrong.

Everyone in this thread who is bashing OP for having particular, niche interests obviously never did any academic work out of undergrad. You don't get to just go to grad school and start writing the theoretical work you always dreamed of. Pretty much every field of inquiry is so exhausted that half of being an academic now means finding openings between disciplines where there's still some elbow room and you can say something original. Go to grad school with a plan to write a book on all your favorite, mainstream offers and see how far that gets you.

>>8817408

Cultural studies are the very definition of intellectual masturbation.

>>8817408

you're part of the last wave of a dying breed of intellectual. the trump election is soil evidence that cultural studies was dead wrong about the future of leftist politics.

>>8817408
>Cognitive science pulls from a wealth of philosophy, mathematics, literature, art, and human expression to build the theories that will someday be used to create artificial intelligence
>You're writing a thesis on a subject that hasn't been relevant since Nixon

Yeah, why spend all day in intellectual masturbation when you can really get your hands dirty with "History in general, how our views on war changed radically during this time period, how that in turn has reflected itself in social movements and protests in places like University, the workplace, government, social settings, etc."

>>8818480
wow this is an arcane meme

gj buddy

>>8818530
I'm this anon >>8816201 and I wasn't bashing OP. I was just genuinely curious, and am admittedly somewhat ignorant of the nature of the humanities (besides philosophy, which is essentially all "theory"). I don't know much about history, current affairs, related" cultural minutiae", so to speak (although I probably know more than you average mainstream pleb). The stuff in the humanities that does interest me is mainly "theory" stuff relating to literary criticism, sociology, and anthropology (I actually know a decent bit of sociology, but not as much off the other two, although like I said, I do like them). I just didn't realize that people would be genuinely interested in (and also that it's common to actively study) such (in my mind) dry, boring, minutiae of limited general significance. Again I'm really not trying to sound like a douche, it's just not my cup of tea.

Personally I'm actually doing precisely the abstract theoretical stuff that I always dreamed of doing when I was younger (first vaguely in high school, and then with more particular and serious interest as I got into my undergrad). And now that I think about it, even amongst STEM fields, shit like math and cognitive science is probably a bit different because it tends to be highly theoretical. I imagine most chemistry majors or computer science major or what have you do pretty boring shit even in grad school.

>>8814165
Just to be clear you know nobody who studies english visits this site right?

>>8818863

You've answered your own question, it's just a matter of personal preference. Some people like you enjoy theoretical work while I personally don't. Maybe I find it too daunting of a task.

My dream will always be expertise; to be the guy who knows everything about a subject that he loves, like op and his view name war literature or Nabokov and his butterflies.

Guys I'm in film studies and quickly realizing that I'll be jobless after. If I switch to English now, I can become a high school English teacher right?

>>8820613
You'll have to get a teaching certificate too, but yeah, you should be able to.

Might be able to teach film too.

>>8820690
That's what I'm planning. I love the cinema though, so it's going to hurt being able to major in it, but I figure English is like the same shit.