Meyer, Christina
War & Trauma Images in Vietnam War Representations

This study juxtaposes American and Vietnamese fictional texts about the war in Vietnam in order to explore the functions and effects of verbal images and thus sheds light on the complex relations between war, trauma, and practices/processes of representation and cultural codification. Identifying the functionalizations of verbal images in the respective texts, the author then relates the findings to a broader set of questions about perception and mediation, and practices of cultural codification. Meyer argues that the writers with their fictions do not only offer critical assessments of the phenomena of de-realizing the war into media (mediatized) events; they also confront readers with ideologically saturated views on reading and interpreting the war, the conceptual matrix/ces, as it were, within which the war (and its - visual - memory) is located. 289 Seiten, broschiert (ECHO - Literaturwissenschaft im interdisziplinären Dialog; Band 11/Olms Verlag 2008)