Vietnamese Literature Research Articles

KIEU THANH QUE AND HIS MONOGRAPH “LITERARY CRITICISM”

The literary legacy of the writer Kiều Thanh Quế can be considered a “fertile land” and an “opening structure” which suggest/require numerous interpretations and judgments. Understanding Kieu Thanh Que’s essential contributions to the formation of theoretical fundamentals of literary criticism helps re-evaluate his role and position in Vietnamese literature of the first half 20th century, especially in literary criticism - Kieu Thanh Que’s most dynamic and productive area of work. This article aims to: 1, introduce his monograph Literary Criticism; 2, point out several features of Kieu Thanh Que’s reasoning and critical thinking; and then 3. highlight his contributions to literary criticism of Vietnamese literature over the period 1932-1945. Contextualizing his book Literary Criticism in such early stage of literary criticism allows us to see clearly how he contributed with his ability to recognize and represent some theoretical and current issues in the field of literary criticism.

THE TENDENCY OF MODERNIZATION IN TAN DA’S LITERATURE - VIEWED FROM A GENRE PERSPECTIVE

During the first 30 years of the twentieth century, Vietnamese literature began to enter the period of restructuring in the direction of modernization. This process occurred in the conflicting existence between two tendencies: the former educated class tried to preserve the traditional values of the classical literature whereas the younger scholars actively absorbed the modern Western literature and gradually moved towards the new literature. Faced with the challenges and opportunities of the time, a Confucian like Tan Da boldly removed the “olds” in the pursuit of the “news”, integrating the Western thoughts into the Eastern wisdom to crystallize a unique and brand new form of literature. His works embraced the depth brought by the Oriental culture and adopted more colors with the Western breaths. Within this modernization process, his efforts to approach modern novels and his tendency to liberalize poetry are two among the most important contributions of Tan Da, opening up possibilities for the next generation of writers as well as helping accelerate modernization in national literature.

ĐẶC SẮC NGHỆ THUẬT KỊCH THƠ HUY THÔNG 1932–1945 TRÊN PHƯƠNG DIỆN ĐỀ TÀI NGÔN NGỮ CỦA LOẠI HÌNH

The article points out that Huy Thong’s drama is biased towards historical topics. This is also a popular topic in Vietnamese literature in the early twentieth century due to the special nature of the nation’s fate. And, also in the trendy nature of the era, Huy Thong’s historical drama is often associated with the theme of love- a love bound to history, an example of former personal tragedy and responsibility. In his efforts, he has made a separate contribution to the drama genre in terms of structure and language. Huy thong’s poems are like hymns of endless love and natural lines. About expressing mood rather than historical express in Huy Thong’s drama is minimalistic, just enough toexpress the writer’s mood.

Định kiến xã hội - một vỉa hiện thực mới trong tiểu thuyết và truyện ngắn của Nam Cao trước Cách mạng

The research article focuses on the question of social prejudice in the novels and short stories of Nam Cao before the Revolution. This survey clarifies the position of writer Nam Cao in the trend of literary realism in particular and contributes about the artistic ideas of Nam Cao to modern Vietnamese literature. The author uses the method of documentary research, methods of systematization, generalizations besides some research skills such as analysis, demonstration, comparison... Since then, the research article has clarified the manifestation of the problem of social prejudice through the world of iconography, the environment, the cause of social prejudice, the way of explaining social prejudice and some solutions of the writer.

Lao culture in the novel "Plains of jars" by Trinh Thanh Phong

Trinh Thanh Phong is one of the typical writers of prose in Tuyen Quang. At the age of sixty five, he has not only contributed much good writing such as novels, poems and stories, for Tuyen Quang literature in particular and Vietnamese literature in general, but also has won awards abroad. “Land at Plains of Jars” is a novel which got Dong Duong Award in the Mekong River Literature Prizes. These were the friendship prizes among Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia awarded in Phnom Penh city in 2008. This paper addresses issues concerning the cachet of Laos culture (especially in friendship between Laos and Vietnam), base on the novel “Plains of Jars”..

From Print Texts to Online Gaming: The Cross-Cultural History ofWuxiaFictions in Vietnam

The popularization of online gaming in Vietnam, including PC and mobile gaming, has witnessed the contribution of wuxia fictions as an essential aspect of digital content production. This article shows an attempt in tracing the cultural history of wuxia works in Vietnam. East-West differences have also been taken into consideration as a way to explain reading and playing preferences. By using life course approach along with the concepts of nostalgia and cultural proximity, this study tries to historically portray the wuxia readership in Vietnam and its vestige found in wuxia online games. The findings indicate that wuxia novels serve as a crucial factor representing the literary relationship between the Sinosphere and Vietnam. Its presence has enriched the content of Vietnamese literature, adding a new genre that has been widely accepted by many generations of Vietnamese readers. Because wuxia online games could be seen as the digital continuation of wuxia fictions, the author argues that prior experience drawn from interacting with wuxia novels affects the game selection-making process of players, and gaming companies in Vietnam also acknowledge that and deploy appropriate business strategies.

Identity of the Vietnamese narrative culture: archetypal journeys from folk narratives to fantasy short stories

The journey to another world is an archetype that exists in the forms of marvelous motifs and is also a typical narrative formula with the purpose of creating diverse versions of Vietnamese folk narratives. The archetypal journey was later reborn and expanded in medieval literature as Vietnamese culture, which has become more complex over time. With the aim of discovering the cultural identity of Vietnamese narratives using sociohistorical approaches and discussing the archetype grounded in specific contexts, this research focuses on journey motifs to the upper and lower world in folk narratives in early collections written in Han characters and in related historical and cultural bibliographies. At the same time, by analyzing the fantasy short stories in Excursive Notes on Weird Stories (Truyen ky man luc) by Nguyen Du, this study aims to discover the process of acculturation and creation of materials and motifs from folk narratives, and it discusses how these motifs have been adapted. This research reveals specific messages about the history, culture, era, voice and true identity of the medieval Vietnamese Confucian. Importantly, this study emphasizes the unification of spiritual power between folklore and Taoism and the powerful and influential competition between Taoism and Confucianism in medieval Vietnamese literature. The analysis shows that by recreating the motifs of the folk narratives, writers have built other world journeys to describe the hidden political discourses and religious conflicts in the thoughts of the human mind in the most ideal form.

Fusion and Innovation: Analysis of New Features of Chinese Poetry in Nanfeng Magazine

This paper aims to explore the new features of Chinese poetry creation in the turn of Vietnamese literature from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. This paper takes the Chinese poetry published in Vietnam's Nanfeng Magazine as an example, based on the data of combing the literature of Chinese poetry. The study points out that the creation of Chinese poetry by Vietnamese literati in this period had new characteristics of the times, that is, the number of female poets has been increased in the main body of poetry creation, new themes of the times have been added to the content of poetry creation, and new formats have been tried in the form of poetry creation. These new features reflected the social changes of Vietnam in the collision of eastern and Western cultures at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and also showed the new era thoughts of Vietnamese scholars in this period.

DIỄN NGÔN VÀ BIỂU TƯỢNG TRONG TIỂU THUYẾT ĐƯỜNG ĐI CỦA LÊ MINH PHONG

Following Mikhail Bakhtin’s poetics, the article approaches Le Minh Phong’s novel The Path from two characteristics including discourse and symbolization. The writer created the coexistence and dialogue between two symbols of awareness and body and used it to present the understanding of people’s lives in modern society. Surrounded by irrational taboos, people fell into the status of losing their voice power. Regaining that lost power, as for the character by Le Minh Phong, is a hopeless path. Hence, the world in the novel exhibited gloom, tearfulness, blood and death, along with the sound of screams, profanity and curses. With the achieved study results, the article contributes to assert Le Minh Phong’s position as a typical artistic style of contemporary Vietnamese literature.

TƯ TƯỞNG HÀNH ĐẠO TRONG THƠ CHỮ HÁN CỦA ĐOÀN NGUYỄN TUẤN

Doan Nguyen Tuan, nick name Hai Ong, Hai Yen village, Quynh Coi district (now known as Hai An village, Quynh Nguyen commune, Quynh Phu district), Thai Binh province. He had Huong sewer following the Le Dynasty but did not work as mandarins, with Vu Huy Tan, Phan Huy Ich, Ngo Thi Nham..., he followed Tay Son. By the concept of flexible museum, Doan Nguyen Tuan pursued and persevered the path of religious practice in the disordered social condition. With more than 200 Han poems still left, Doan Nguyen Tuan had the opportunity to show quite clearly the important aspects of the content of the thought of his practice. Thus, it can be affirmed that he is one of the authors of fictional literature in the second half of the eighteenth century in particular, of Vietnamese literature in general. This is the main content we set out and solved in this article.

Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism and Camus’s existentialist philosophy

Lê Tuyên was among the most notable literary critics of South Vietnam during the period 1954 – 1975. He has been best known for being one of the first Vietnamese to adopt and apply phenomenological criticism, especially Bachelardian analysis of the imaginaire and poetic reveries. However, in our opinion, there are other philosophical views rather than Bachelardian thought embedded in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism, one of which is existentialist ideas. In this paper, based on the fact that Lê Tuyên frequently cited Camus and published several articles introducing Camus’s ideas, we would like to discover the notable relationship between Lê Tuyên and Albert Camus with an aim to get deeper insight into the existential perspective in Lê Tuyên’s literary criticism. We thus make a comparison between Camus’s existentialist philosophy and Lê Tuyên’s view of human life presented in his works of literary criticism. There are two main similarities. Firstly, Camus and Lê Tuyên both focused on discovering and analyzing the absurdity of human condition. They also both argued that absurdity is not a property of life, but an experience formed in our relationship with the world. Secondly, while analyzing the revolt of heroes and heroines in Vietnamese late-medieval literature agaisnt absurdity, Lê Tuyên agreed with Camus that illusory hopes, metaphysical beliefs and ignorant rebellions should be criticized, but it is crucial to dialogue with life, to fully understand what life is and what we truly are.

A STUDY ON CONTRASTIVE PARALLEL-STRUCTURED SENTENCES UNDER SEMANTIC FIELD PERSPECTIVE

Contrastive parallel-structured sentence (CPSS) was a traditionally artistic kind of Vietnamese literature, which was originated from the Chinese. The aims of this article is to investigate all kinds of the CPSS and the semantic field aspects inherently existing in it; adding that the article targets in what social occasions the Vietnamese use the CPSS the most. To have a deep insight into the semantic field aspects in the CPSS, the article has applied integrated methods such as descriptive method, analytical method and statistic method. In this article, the semantic field in the CPSS was showed, analyzed and discussed to reveal the application of linguistic units such as the phenomena of synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, fixed phrases and especially semantic field, adding that to show how words are exploited with the same semantic field.

The Emergence of Humans and the Origin of Vietnamese Ethnic Groups from Vietnamese Myths

The origin of humans has been at the center of attention throughout most of the history of humanity and remained debatable. Humankind is more interested in tracing back his ancestors than ever. The theory of evolution by natural selection, first formulated in Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, shows that most species are descended from common ancestors. However, most countries and ethnic groups have their own explanation and interpretation of the origin of humans from the dawn of the civilization in their myths. Particularly, many myths and legends about the beginnings of humans have cropped up and varied across religions, races, ethnics, nations and reflect their daily and spiritual life as well as their beliefs. This paper is devoted to exploring 24 Vietnamese myths concerning the emergence of humans and Vietnamese ethnic groups from the earliest time within a motif-based approach. The study reveals that most collected Vietnamese myths of human emergence are utterly imaginative, artistic and creative with a wide variety of motifs. They bear, however, some similarities in the plot and motif such as: (i) creation of Vietnamese people from eggs, gourds and clay; (ii) natural disasters like floods and droughts and (iii) consanguineous marriage and animal marriage. Last but not least, mythical narration and epic poems play a crucial role in Vietnamese literature, history, religions, beliefs and culture. The author does not aim at comparing origin myths of Vietnam and other countries in this paper but generally introduce the reader to these myths. Received 18th September 2019; Revised 19th February 2020; Accepted 20th March 2020

TỪ HÌNH TƯỢNG NGƯ TIỀU TRONG THI CA CỔ ĐIỂN TRUNG QUỐC ĐẾN HÌNH TƯỢNG NGƯ TIỀU TRONG THI CA CỔ ĐIỂN VIỆT NAM

TỪ HÌNH TƯỢNG NGƯ TIỀU TRONG THI CA CỔ ĐIỂN TRUNG QUỐC ĐẾN HÌNH TƯỢNG NGƯ TIỀU TRONG THI CA CỔ ĐIỂN VIỆT NAM

The Sea and the Kingfisher of Bui Ngoc Tan: on the perspective of sociocriticism

“The Sea and the Kingfisher” (French: La Mer et le martin-pêcheur) is a special novel written by Bui Ngoc Tan. This work is not only the pride of contemporary Vietnamese literature in general and Hai Phong literature in particular when it won the Henri Queffenlec Award in France in 2012; but also the stamp of the author's journey "resurrection of the dead", after more than 5 years of imprisonment and 20 years of torture of reading and writing.
 Because of his special circumstances, social change is always reflected in Bui Ngoc Tan’s work. “The Sea and the Kingfisher” is the same as a little cosmos, a panoramic discourse reflecting all of the love and sorrow of a generation having to face so many incidents and ideological conflicts.
 Above all of the limited literature, “The Sea and the Kingfisher” is a worthy writing. This is seen as a realistic novel, straight and steady, which exposes a world that is still deep in darkness, beneath the golden and glamorous slogan. There are honest people buried deep in the bottom, crumpled and writhed, silently alive, and silently dead. "Belles-lettres" of Bui Ngoc Tan, is a chord of many "words" that were invoked from thousands and thousands of lives of anonymity in the same era. It is both pristine, bitter, and a sigh of pain, laden with deep thoughts. It's also the crystallization of the love of life and faith, thus the aspiration of social transformation.
 Using the sociocriticism, the writer focuses on researching the relationship between life and the working life of Bui Ngoc Tan through his works. And then, we will reach a deeper understanding of the value of Bui Ngoc Tan's literary heritage, the morality or the self-consciousness of the writer's social role, and the aspirations to improve society by literature that he cherished all life.

Between Propaganda and Cao-Mienism

The generation of soldiers, advisors, politicians, and civilians who participated in Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia between 1978 and 1989 had diverse, colorful, and powerful experiences. Their impressions and reflections as immortalized in diaries, songs, poems, plays, short stories, and even novels form the core of popular memory of Vietnam’s long involvement in Cambodia, which I term Vietnam’s Cambodian Decade. I argue that all Vietnamese literature on this period exhibits some combination of state propaganda to justify the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia on the one hand, and exoticization of Cambodia and Cambodians on the other. This latter tendency I term “Cao-Mienism,” drawing the connection between Edward W. Said’s critique of Orientalism and the old Vietnamese term for Cambodia, Cao Miên, which carries many outdated connotations of a mystical, uncivilized, violent, and hypersexual other. I divide Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade into four distinct groups, based largely on the chronological order of their publication, but also on the distinct literary characteristics of each group, thereby charting the evolution of Vietnamese views of the Cambodian Decade through the years. My main finding is that Vietnamese literature on the Cambodian Decade started out largely to serve the needs of state propaganda, but has in time shifted decisively to Cao-Mienizing Cambodia. I conclude by warning that both strands of propaganda and Cao-Mienization remain relevant in contemporary Vietnamese literature and can serve to perpetuate and legitimize a hegemonic discourse on Cambodia that is detrimental to bilateral relations.

Writing to Remember

This essay addresses the controversial reception of Bảo Ninh’s novel Nỗi buồn chiến tranh [The Sorrow of War] in Vietnam and argues that the novel was perhaps the most important fictional work since Đổi Mới [Renovation]. By overlooking the tenets of socialist realism, the book deals with the war and its aftermath with a candor, eloquence, and anguish that have no parallel in modern Vietnamese literature. The novel’s important questions—memory, time, and writing—can be explained in light of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope.

Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism in Contemporary Vietnam: Indian Characters in Hồ Anh Thái’s Writings

This paper explores the relationship between literary representation and nationalism in contemporary Vietnam, a socialist state which has opened up to capitalist forms of economic organization. It asks if Vietnamese literature has changed its political role in the context of Vietnam pursuing policies of economic liberalization, engaging with global capitalist relations and opening to global private capitalist sectors. In other words, the paper asks how national literature, a body of literary works in the Vietnamese language that was historically constructed in anti-colonial, anti-imperial terms, has participated in the contemporary cultural, economic and political projects that the Vietnamese state has undertaken in order to retain its socialist and nationalist goals, while practicing transnational negotiation and socialist flexibility. In continuing the tradition of constructing Indian characters as “capitalists” and “foreign invaders,” Hồ Anh Thái’s writing suggests that the so-called political and economic relaxation of post-reform Vietnam is a strategy for the Vietnamese state to maintain itself on the path of socialism and nationalism. Through its examination of Hồ Anh Thái’s novels and short stories, focusing on their construction of Indian characters, the paper argues that socialist realism remains the guiding principle of contemporary Vietnamese literature. The choice of Hồ Anh Thái and his writing about Indians is based on the fact that the author and the Indian setting of his work embody important political and economic characteristics of post-reform Vietnam.

Gothic Resistances: Flesh, Bones, Ghosts and Time in Vietnamese Postwar Fiction

In contrast to the thousands of critical studies of American writing on the Vietnam War, there has been a relative dearth of English-language appraisals of Vietnamese literature of the American War (as it is known in Vietnam). This disparity in understanding partly informs anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s distinction between “the idiom of ghost” often used in American memories of the war and the widespread public belief in war ghosts in Vietnam, whose war dead numbered approximately fifty times that of the American military forces, and whose citizens continued to suffer long after the war due to the most extensive bombing and chemical weapons campaigns in the history of humankind.This paper explores novels (by Bao Ninh and Duong Thu Huong) and short stories by (Le Minh Khue, Ho Anh Thai, Ngo Tu Lap and Phan Hy Dong) from the rich wave of Vietnamese postwar fiction which began to be published and translated in the early 1990s. Through close readings of these works, this study will analyse how local customs of the dead combine with Gothic forms and features – flesh, bones, ghosts and time – to create fictional and memorial resistances to myths and ideologies which have sought to cast the war in more traditional tropes of nationalism and heroism.

Wpływ polityki kursowej na inflację w Wietnamie w latach 2008 i 2011

Przedmiot badań: Przedmiotem badań były zmiany w polityce kursowej prowadzonej przez Bank Państwowy Wietnamu w latach 2008 i 2011 jako reakcja na przepływ kapitału zagranicz­nego w tym okresie.
 Cel badawczy: Celem niniejszego artykułu był opis polityki kursowej oraz analizy jej zmian powo­dujących zróżnicowanie wpływu wahań kursowych na inflację w Wietnamie w latach 2008 i 2011.
 Metoda badawcza: W artykule dokonano przeglądu literatury w zakresie kursu walutowego i polityki kursowej. Do analizy wykorzystano dane ze źródeł wtórnych, m.in. raporty, publikacje i opracowania – głównie z wietnamskiego piśmiennictwa.
 Wyniki: Badania pokazały, że jedną z przyczyn niezwykle wysokiej inflacji w rozpatrywanych latach w Wietnamie był nadmierny wzrost ilości pieniądza w obiegu nad wzrostem dóbr pod wpływem polityki kursowej prowadzonej przez Bank Państwowy Wietnamu (BPW). Powody tego zjawiska są jednak różne w poszczególnych latach, a mianowicie: w 2008 r. to interwencja Banku Państwowego Wietnamu w celu utrzymania kursu walutowego na ustalonym poziomie, natomiast w 2011 r. – dewaluacja wietnamskiej waluty.