How to Revise a True War Story

How to Revise a True War Story PDF Author: John K. Young
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O’Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war’s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and through continuing post-publication variants in reprints. How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such key texts as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods. By reading not just the texts that have been published, but also the versions they could have been, Young demonstrates the important choices O’Brien and his editors have made about how to represent the traumas of the war in Viet Nam. The result is a series of texts that refuse to settle into a finished or stable form, just as the stories they present insist on being told and retold in new and changing ways. In their lack of textual stability, these variants across different versions enact for O’Brien’s readers the kinds of narrative volatility that is key to the American literature emerging from the war in Viet Nam. Perhaps in this case, you can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it.

How to Revise a True War Story

How to Revise a True War Story PDF Author: John K. Young
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384687
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O’Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war’s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and through continuing post-publication variants in reprints. How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such key texts as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods. By reading not just the texts that have been published, but also the versions they could have been, Young demonstrates the important choices O’Brien and his editors have made about how to represent the traumas of the war in Viet Nam. The result is a series of texts that refuse to settle into a finished or stable form, just as the stories they present insist on being told and retold in new and changing ways. In their lack of textual stability, these variants across different versions enact for O’Brien’s readers the kinds of narrative volatility that is key to the American literature emerging from the war in Viet Nam. Perhaps in this case, you can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried PDF Author: Tim O'Brien
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547420293
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Close Quarters

Close Quarters PDF Author: Larry Heinemann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307517705
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
From the moment his first novel was published, Larry Heinemann joined the ranks of the great chroniclers of the Vietnam conflict--Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and Gustav Hasford. In the stripped-down, unsullied patois of an ordinary soldier, draftee Philip Dosier tells the story of his war. Straight from high school, too young to vote or buy himself a drink, he enters a world of mud and heat, blood and body counts, ambushes and firefights. It is here that he embarks on the brutal downward path to wisdom that awaits every soldier. In the tradition of Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line, Close Quarters is the harrowing story of how a decent kid from Chicago endures an extraordinary trial-- and returns profoundly altered to a world on the threshold of change.

A Study Guide for Tim O’Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home"

A Study Guide for Tim O’Brien's Author: Gale, Cengage
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 0028671031
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
A Study Guide for Tim O’Brien's "If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

A Trauma Artist

A Trauma Artist PDF Author: Mark A. Heberle
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 0877457611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
Based on recent conversations with Tim O'Brien, previously published interviews, and new readings of all his works -- including Tomcat in Love -- this book is the first study to concentrate on the role and representation of trauma as the central focus of all O'Brien's works. Book jacket.

How to Revise a True War Story

How to Revise a True War Story PDF Author: John K. Young
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609384679
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the American war in Viet Nam, O’Brien has kept on telling true war stories not only in narratives that cycle through multiple fictional and non-fictional versions of the war’s defining experiences, but also by rewriting those stories again and again. Key moments of revision extend from early drafts, to the initial appearance of selected chapters in magazines, across typescripts and page proofs for first editions, and through continuing post-publication variants in reprints. How to Revise a True War Story is the first book-length study of O’Brien’s archival papers at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center. Drawing on extensive study of drafts and other prepublication materials, as well as the multiple published versions of O’Brien’s works, John K. Young tells the untold stories behind the production of such key texts as Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods. By reading not just the texts that have been published, but also the versions they could have been, Young demonstrates the important choices O’Brien and his editors have made about how to represent the traumas of the war in Viet Nam. The result is a series of texts that refuse to settle into a finished or stable form, just as the stories they present insist on being told and retold in new and changing ways. In their lack of textual stability, these variants across different versions enact for O’Brien’s readers the kinds of narrative volatility that is key to the American literature emerging from the war in Viet Nam. Perhaps in this case, you can tell a true war story if you just keep on revising it.

Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”

Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It” PDF Author: George H. Jensen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040090672
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 215

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Book Description
Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It”: The Search for Beauty is the first book-length study of Norman Maclean or any of his works. Since the publication of “A River Runs through It” in 1976, readers and critics have considered it to be one of the most carefully crafted stories in American literature, in terms of both its structure and its style. The beauty of the story came with much hard work. This study traces Maclean’s revisions through four handwritten drafts and three typescripts, quoting extensively from previously unpublished material. The analysis of Maclean’s composition process lays the foundation for original and detailed discussions of other aspects of Maclean’s craft, such as his approach to genre and style. The study publishes for the first time the complete text of the notes that Maclean wrote after the first draft of “A River Runs through It.”

Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien PDF Author: Tobey C Herzog
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351375032
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
This collection of seven essays, like the carefully linked collection of vignettes within Tim O’Brien’s most popular book The Things They Carried, contains multiple critical and biographical angles with recurring threads of life events, themes, characters, creative techniques, and references to all of O’Brien’s books. Grounded in through research, Herzog’s work illustrates how O’Brien merges his life experiences with his creative production; he rarely misses an opportunity to introduce these critical life events into his writing.

Ecospatiality

Ecospatiality PDF Author: Lowell Wyse
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609387759
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Ecospatiality explores modern and contemporary American prose literature through the lens of place, showing how authors like William Least Heat-Moon, Willa Cather, Richard Wright, and Leslie Marmon Silko represent and reimagine real places in the world and the human-environment relationships therein. Building on the work of scholars in geography, sociology, ecocriticism, and geocriticism, this book articulates the theory of ecospatiality: an understanding of place as simultaneously spatial, ecological, and historical. In our current historical moment, which is characterized by ongoing ecological collapse and a not-unrelated increase in social disorder, few issues are more urgent than the human relationship with our environments. Whether we characterize this new epoch as the climate change era or the Anthropocene, we can no longer ignore the fact that the places we live are rapidly changing in response to economic and environmental pressures. Rather than thinking of place as a neutral site for social interaction, we should recognize how it underpins and intertwines with human experience. Fortunately, literature can help us think through how place operates. Lowell Wyse shows that texts can be understood as works of literary cartography. Focusing on works of nonfiction and fiction whose primary settings are on the North American continent, Ecospatiality demonstrates how these narratives rely on realistic literary geography to invoke, and sometimes retell, important aspects of environmental history within particular communities and bioregions.

Writing Wars

Writing Wars PDF Author: David F. Eisler
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388658
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
Introduction -- "Stick to Her Farms and Farmer Folk": World War I and the Origins of Combat Gnosticism -- "Tell It Like It Was": World War II and the Institutional Curation of Memory -- "You Had to Be There": Vietnam and the Veteran's Consolidation of Authority -- "You Don't Have to Be a Veteran": The All-Volunteer Force and the Dispersion of Authority -- "The New Battle": The Civil-Military Gap and the Shock of Coming Home -- "The Other Side of COIN": Counterinsurgency and the Ethics of Memory -- "You Volunteered to Get Screwed": Public Trust and the Literary Representation of the Professional Military -- Appendix: The American Novels of Iraq and Afghanistan through 2020.