Vietnamese Literature Research Articles

Cultural Policies and Literary Legacies of Vietnamese Renovation

This article examines the đổi mới (renovation) process in Vietnam from the lens of literature. Đổi mới represented a critical milestone in the modern history of Vietnam that marked a fundamental turning point in the development of Vietnamese literature, culture and art, paving the way to a rethinking of cultural policies and enabling Vietnamese literature to break free from its enslavement to politics. This article contextualizes the renovation and delineates the principal cultural policies governing Vietnamese literature in the 1986-91 period. It pays special attention to one of the most prominent representatives of renovation literature, the writer Nguyễn Huy Thiệp.

Vietnam. Treacherous subjects: Gender, culture, and trans-Vietnamese feminism. By Lan P. Duong. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Pp. 243. Illustrations.

Treacherous subjects: Gender, culture, and trans-Vietnamese feminism By CAN P. DUONG Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Pp. 243. Illustrations. doi: 10.1017/S0022463413000519 In Treacherous subjects, Lan Duong does what most Asian Americanists studiously avoid, that is, she engages in sharp criticism of nationalism in so-called 'homeland' and community politics. Her ambitious new book provides a courageous and much-needed gender analysis of Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American and French-Vietnamese literature and film, hopefully paving the way for new scholarship that looks across national borders. This approach should prove particularly fruitful in analysing Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic cultural productions. Not only does it disrupt the borders placed by the institutionalisation of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies and the ideological divide between Vietnam and refugee communities abroad, it also reveals the impact of the legacy of colonisation and American imperialism on women and the stories they produce. Such complex comparative examination creates new ways of conceptualising Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic identities. The tensions created by having to side with one ideology or the decision to stay or leave Vietnam continues to haunt Vietnamese and those living in the diaspora. Lan Duong begins the book with a personal story to indicate her positionality. Her father was labelled a collaborator of 'Vietnam's colonial and Cold War enemies' by the Vietnamese because he left Vietnam as a refugee in 1975, while her mother was considered loyal because she stayed behind. Both suffered tremendous loss as the family was separated. The themes of loyalty and 'treason' are most relevant to Vietnamese and refugee Vietnamese in the diaspora. Trust or the inability to trust still pervades family and community dynamics as Duong argues, collective anxiety surrounds the impossibility or inability to remain faithful to one ideology or commitment, as historical and traumatic events unfold. These anxieties, she firmly shows, are overwhelmingly projected onto the bodies of women. Accusations of treason do not reflect reality, but point instead she says to the perceived interest in strengthening alliances for the purpose of nation or community building. In this book, Lan Duong specifically examines the impact of what she calls 'the trauma of betrayal' marking Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic subjectivities. Although these are characterised by divided loyalties and shifting alliances, she carefully points out that these are 'not fixed and tend to fluctuate with economic and political relations between countries. Duong uncovers double meanings in collaborative postwar Vietnamese and Vietnamese diasporic literary and filmic representations, most interestingly in cultural works around the theme of treasonous collaboration. …

Promoting the effect of presentation skills - group discussion method in teaching Vietnamese literature to foreign students

Currently, in the training curriculum of Bachelor degree in Vietnamese Studies (for an audience of foreign students), Vietnamese Literature is one of the compulsory subjects. This is an interesting subject, but hard for foreign students due to limited language skills nad capacities. Therefore, how to motivate foreign students to excitedly learn Vietnamese Literature and thoroughly understand literary works of Vietnamese literature? This paper raises some experiences in the application of the group discussion method based on the hierarchical theory of Benjamin Bloom's thinking when we teach Vietnamese Literature to foreign students, particularly fulltime regular students (in the formal system) studying at the Faculty of Vietnamese Studies, University of Social Sciences and Humanities – Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City. This method helps teachers to maximize the motto “learnercentered”, and also helps students to make effective use of P.O.W.E.R studying methods (initiated by Professor of Psychology Robert S. Feldman, University of Massachusetts) in order to promote active, positive and creative learning.

I Speak in the Third Person: Women and Language in Colonial Vietnam

This essay examines the cultural translation of the Western first-person grammatical category into Vietnamese literature during French colonial rule. In the 1930s, Vietnamese writers began to assimilate the first-person pronoun “tôi” into their writing. The prevalence of tôi suggests a shift from Vietnamese collectivism to individualism during this period. However, through a reading of Khái Hưng's novel Nửa chừng xuân (In the Midst of Spring), this article argues that although male Vietnamese writers adapted the European first-person grammatical category to express individual autonomy, modern female authors and protagonists remained circumscribed by sociolinguistic structures and thus were unable to assume the first-person voice. Khái Hưng's novel, I contend, addresses the gendered transformations of modern Vietnamese language and literature by exploring how the female protagonist must discursively relate herself with and against existing sociolinguistic structures. The heroine's subjectivity is formed not through an appropriation of European individualism but rather through the chasm between the imported first-person and the sociolinguistic structures particular to Vietnam.

HISTORICAL NOVELS OF PHAM MINH KIEN

Based on the introduction of Pham Minh Kien’s literary career, together with the analysis of his novels, this paper affirms that Pham Minh Kien is a historical novel writer, and that he has made significant contributions to the Southern literature in particular and to Vietnamese literature in general at the first half of the twentieth century.

Epitaphic Nation: The Problem of the South and Necropolitics in Early Modern Vietnamese National Literature

Whoever goes down to Bà Ria and happens by the cemetery in the sand at the village of Phu'ó'c Lě, I beg you to go in that cemetery and look for the grave with a cross painted half black, half white, by the side of the Church of Martyrs–to visit that grave lest it become pitiful. Because it has been two years since anyone visited or cast as much as a glance.—Nguyễn Trong QuanSO opens nguyễn trọng quản's thẩy lazaro phiển (“lazaro phiển” 22). The narrative begins at an obscure gravesite evokes the life of a man as both victim of state violence and perpetrator of private deaths. Lazaro Phiển is a ictional work written in the romanized script and was published in Saigon in 1887 in a novelistic format almost forty years before Hoàng Ngọc Phách's Tố Tâm. Yet the latter, published in Hanoi in 1925, is oten touted in official literary history as the first modern Vietnamese novel. Although Nguyễn Trọng Qu.n's narrative revolves around the recovery of an elided story, the author could not have anticipated the elision of his work from a nationalist literary genealogy that locates the origin of modern Vietnamese literature in the North. he elision was part of a general omission of works from the South in the last decades of the nineteenth century and irst two decades of the twentieth. his genealogy was by no means limited to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North but was also perpetuated in the Republic of Vietnam in the South ater independence and the partitioning of the country into North and South in 1954

Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World (review)

Reviewed by: Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World Leslie Barnes Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David Troyansky , eds. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. xxiv + 427 pp. Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, the second volume of interdisciplinary articles originating in a comparative literature symposium held at Texas Tech University in 2002, brings historians and literary scholars together to explore the interrelated questions of migration, identity, and Francophonie. The first section, entitled "Colonialism and Immigration," situates concerns in contemporary France in relation to the twentieth-century colonial empire. Inquiry ranges from Philip Dine's analysis of the ideological construction of French Algeria to Keith David Watenpaugh's reading of the political ambiguity of collaboration in mandate Syria between 1920 and 1946 to Elisa Camiscioli's discussion of intersecting [End Page 111] organicist and assimilationist metaphors in interwar-year French immigration discourse. The section on "Immigrant Spaces and Identities" opens with Neil MacMaster's discussion of the ways in which Maghrebian migrants reappropriated space in French and Algerian bidonvilles to recreate a "sense of internal cohesion and solidarity" (77) and the French state's attempt to destroy that order by imposing Eurocentric notions of domesticity and "normalcy" on migrant communities. Todd Shepard continues the interrogation of Algerian populations in France by documenting the plight of the harkis—Algerian collaborators with French colonial authorities—in the wake of independence and noting the series of legal maneuvers by which the French government made "refugees" out of "citizens," effectively "effacing law and harki rights" (98). The section ends with Alain Gabon's article, which situates Mathieu Kassovitz's cinematic representations of youth and multiculturalism in Métisse and La Haine in a global perspective. In the third section the focus shifts to "Writing Algerian Identities" through the lens of gender and sexuality. Robert Aldrich's cogent discussion of Jean Sénac's political writings and tragic demise in post-independence Algeria illuminates the paradox of pied-noir support for Algerian nationalism. Trudy Agar-Mendousse reads Malika Mokeddem's novels as an example of "creative counterviolence" (188) with which the female Algerian author undermines colonial and patriarchal authority. Finally, Mary McCullough's article on Leïla Sebbar poses important questions about literary categorization and expectations placed on the "beur" author. The articles in the fourth section provide socio-historical, literary, and philosophical interrogations of "Jewish Migrations and Identities" in France and North Africa. Sarah Sussman begins by documenting the linguistic and culinary customs of Algerian Jewish populations in France. Johann Sadock analyzes the complex and shifting perspectives of "anti-Other tendencies" (247) in post-1948 literary representations of Jews, Arabs, and French in "Oriental" Jewish Literature. Brigitte Weltman-Aron contributes the final article, which brings Memmi into dialogue with Derrida and Cixous on the persistent indeterminacy marking North African Jewish identity. Opening the inquiry to a larger geographical field, the articles in the fifth section cover "Francophone Spaces and Identities" in the contexts [End Page 112] of Lebanon, Africa, the Caribbean, and Vietnam. Antony Johae's article explores Lebanese author Amin Maalouf's use of the traveler to express an identity as self and other, noting that for Maalouf, "every one of us has our origin in migration, and every one of us belongs to the diaspora of the world" (301). Joseph Militello's reading of the madwoman archetype in relation to the "postcolonial Third World nonwhite male authorities" (318) in Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane and Mariama Bâ's Un Chant écarlante is a welcomed foray into Afro-Caribbean struggles with identity. In the last two articles, Georges Van Den Abbeele and Ali Yédes investigate the Vietnamese tradition. Van Den Abbeele, insisting on the multifaceted nature of the Vietnamese diaspora, reads contemporary Vietnamese literature in Vietnamese, English, and French as a practice where "exile and return, love and betrayal become complex faces of each other" (337). Through a close reading of the nineteenth-century Vietnamese epic, The Tale of Kiêu, Yédes locates the seeds of Vietnamese modernity not in the introduction of a French education model, as others have suggested, but in Vietnam's own literary...

From Triumph to Tragedy: Visualizing War in Vietnamese Film and Fiction

This article explores ways in which post-war Vietnamese cinema and literature visualize the conflict and trauma of the American War in Vietnam. As Vietnamese writers and directors search for new creative forms to capture adequately the complexity of war experiences, they increasingly remove the conflict from the paradigms of triumph and victory to explore it instead within the paradigms of loss, suffering and trauma. By exposing and validating multifaceted individual war memories, they mount an effective challenge to the established official canon of war literature and cinema in Vietnam and serve as a powerful means of dissent. This article gives special consideration to the Vietnamese film Sống trong số hãi [Living in Fear], released in 2005, which attempts to reconstruct the genre of war film in Vietnam by accentuating humanism and downplaying nationalism and ideology.

KIM SO-WOL AND NGUYEN BINH KINDRED SOULS OF THE SAME SORROW

Kim So-wol and Nguyen Binh are poets living and writing in special ages of North Korean and Vietnamese literature: the first steps of literature modernization process which was full of success. They are strangely alike in poetry talent, in melancholy, and in the death by the beginning of spring. Their very sad life together with their poetry genius is witness for the marvellous meeting of the two oriental poets. Their background tendency is firm dependence on tradition, and imitation of beautiful melody from national folk-songs to inspire the writing. They resemble each other in the way they create passionate modern folk-songs of the same consonance and upright hearts, desperate wrench of painful love, and sorrowful songs of the road. Through their masterpieces with deep prints in readers’ minds, Kim So-wol and Nguyen Binh nurture poetry veins toward tradition and assert the value of that style in the face of changes of history and literature.

The roles of capital and technological progress in Vietnam's economic growth

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to measure the contribution of capital formation, labor, and technological progress to the growth of the Vietnamese economy, the impact of economic reforms (doi moi) since the end of 1986, and the rates of returns to capital and labor.Design/methodologyapproachCobb‐Douglas production functions are built for Vietnam's economy and then estimated using annual data for 1975‐2005.FindingsThe two major findings are that: technological progress was statistically absent in the growth of the Vietnamese economy throughout the period studied; and the most important source of economic growth is capital accumulation, accounting for between 84 percent and 89 percent of Vietnamese economic growth throughout the period 1975‐2005, and between 85 percent and 90 percent in the reform period (1986‐2005).Originality/valueThis paper is the first of its kind in the Vietnamese literature that successfully sheds light on, among other things, the roles of capital and technological progress in the Vietnamese economy during the period 1975‐2005. It also makes clear that Vietnam's economic growth has been fueled mainly by foreign funds and, thus, the continued heavy reliance of the economy on this financial source will make its growth unsustainable. In order to achieve sustainable growth in the coming decades, Vietnam must shift to rely more on productivity growth, which has been absent so far, and less on factor accumulation growth.

History Interrupted: Life after Material Death in South Vietnamese and Diasporic Works of Fiction

The article uses Derrida's spectrality to look at magical realism in South Vietnamese and diasporic literature in Vietnamese. Diasporic literature has been said to be either a simple extension of literature from the Republic of Vietnam or a drastic break, with its prevalent use of magic. The article argues instead that the very disruption of the history of the South is the creative force behind both. It is the death of the South foretold that animated Republican writing. And it is the death of the South that forces the symbolization of history in the new global economic context of diasporic fiction.

The Decline of Socialist Realism in Post-1975 Vietnamese Literature

In Vietnam, Socialist Realism served as a tool for the party and the state to control art and literature. Its emphasis on the utilitarian function of literature and collectivism is a good explanation for why it flourished in Socialist countries, including Vietnam. However, Socialist Realism was found unsuitable for the development of Vietnamese literature in the post-1975 period. This study tries to examine how Socialist Realism was adopted and adapted in Vietnam, and why it was challenged in the post-war period.

Agricultural land-use patterns and soil erosion vulnerability of watershed units in Vietnam’s northern highlands

Since the mid eighties, agricultural development and increased population growth in Vietnam’s northern highlands have modified land use patterns and thus, increased the runoff process and soil degradation induced by water erosion. In the last decade, Vietnamese literature has focused on the computation of soil losses over large areas. Most of these spatial and quantitative soil erosion studies do not consider the impact of agricultural land use diversity (spatial heterogeneity), particularly at the watershed scale, and the annual variability of seasonal landscape factors on soil erosion vulnerability and hence, landscape dynamics. We present an integrated approach combining field measurements and observations, GIS and modeling to determine the spatial and temporal dynamics of soil erosion vulnerability according to watershed units and hence, the impact of physical environment components and agricultural land use patterns on landscape evolution. Tables and graphics showing the cropping systems, the periods within a year, and the watershed units that are most vulnerable are presented. The double cultivation cycles for paddy rice fields not only imply two periods of land preparation and establishment that expose the soil surface to raindrop impacts, but also increased soil management practices that decrease the soil’s resistance to detachment. Despite the low levels of soil management practices for the shifting cultivation system, the near absence of soil conservation practices clearly increases their vulnerability. Hence, rainfed cropping systems, mainly soya and cassava, cultivated on sloping lands (hills and mountains) where soil erosion vulnerability is the highest represent the watershed units which are the most prone to soil loss.

Une opportunité pour Dieu: du journal intime à l'atelier d'écriture

Twenty years after the Dôi Moi movement initiated by the Vietnamese Communist party, a new generation of writers emerged. Their works revive the artistic values of the past overlooked by their predecessors, whose novels were mostly focussed on political themes. This paper is about Nguyễn Việt Hà's novel Cơ hôi cúa Chúa (An Opportunity for God), published in 1999. One of the leading writers of his generation, Nguyễn Việt Hà offers a powerful synthesis of various visions of the Self in Vietnamese literature. He scrutinizes the internal monologues and personal diaries of four characters in order to expose various "selves" shedding light on each other, a rhetorical device that allows the novel to gives off a deep sense of uncertainty and anxiety. The usual theme of the individual's faith in one's emancipation — whether social (through Marxism-Leninism), or national (through fighting against enemies) — gives way to an absolute lack of ideal characteristic of the post-war generation. Moreover, the study of the hero- narrator shows that it is the act of writing itself that constitues Nguyễn Việt Hà's favorite topic, an inclination shared by many other contemporary writers. This phenomenon represents an aspect of self-analysis within Vietnamese literature which leads to the advocacy for the power of subjectivity and the prominence of personal invention.

Litterature et temps colonial: metamorphoses du regard sur la Mediterranee et liAfrique (review)

Reviewed by: Littérature et temps colonial: métamorphoses du regard sur la Méditerranée et l’Afrique Benjamin Claude Brower Littérature et temps colonial: métamorphoses du regard sur la Méditerranée et l’Afrique. Ed. Jean-Robert Henry et Lucienne Martini Actes du colloque d’Aix-en-Provence 07– 0804 1997, Centre des Arches d’Outre Mer. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1999. 344pp. ISBN 2-7449-0066-4. Five years before Edward Said's landmark work Orientalismand a decade after Algerian independence, a group of researchers met in Algiers to study colonial literature and ideology. Integrating theoretical currents then transforming literary studies (Althusser, Goldmann, Barthes, and Kristeva), they produced an innovative and exciting work ( Revue algérienne des sciences juridiques économiques et politiques11.1, mars 1974). However, a robust field devoted to the study of colonial literature failed to develop. French and francophone students, reacting to a general lack of interest in works considered racist, paternalist, or apologetic, shunned colonial writers. Nevertheless, some who were part of this first project, like Jean-Robert Henry, persisted, and in the 1970s and 80s, Henry led French research into important questions of culture and politics in colonial contexts, and edited and authored several key texts. Littérature et temps colonialpresents the work of thirty, multinational scholars who were united by Henry and Lucienne Martini in 1997. As might be expected, there is unevenness in a volume with so many contributions. Some articles are brief sketches of early research, of interest to the specialist, while others contain advanced readings of colonial texts for a wide academic audience. Among the latter, articles by Colette Dubois, Éric Savarèse, and Daniel Denis stand out. Dubois surveys French adventure novels and investigative journalism for sensational accounts of the Red Sea slave trade. Savarèse interrogates constructions of French-African difference in children's books (1930-62) and gives a theoretically sophisticated reading of the ideological currents that inform these texts. In a similar vein, Denis examines Third Republic textbooks to understand how exotic discourses combined with new debates [End Page 131]on national hygiene to produce a belief in the revitalizing qualities of the colonies for French youth. North African subjects account for nearly half of the articles. Some offer new perspectives on familiar figures such as Isabelle Eberhardt, Albert Memmi, and Albert Camus (Danielle Marx-Scouras's rereading of critical possibilities in Camus's fiction is noteworthy), while others treat themes from the colonial "imaginary" such as the desert and violence. Jacques Frémeaux, Rosalia Bivona, and Charlotte de Montigny look at the desert in colonial texts, and Fabienne Le Houérou examines Henry de Monfreid's work and texts from Italian soldier-colonists in Ethiopia, the insabbiatto(stranded in the sand). Alain Mahé begins with the provocative observation that writings on colonial Algeria are "saturated" with violence before he turns to Saïd Guennoun (1887-1940), an Algerian writer and soldier who wrote intimate descriptions of anticolonial and intracommunal conflict. Zineb Ali-Benali examines Abdelkader Fikri and Robert Randau's vision of a different French Algeria or the "(im)possible futures for Algerians" (243). Two articles are outside of Africa. In the first, Arundhati Virmani contests Edward Said's reading of Kipling's Kim. The second, by Alain Guillemin, explores questions of language and nationalism in francophone Vietnamese literature. Overall, a clear project does not emerge in this volume, and it lacks the range of other French collections on postcolonial questions such as Le mal de voir(1976) and D'un orient l'autre(1991). One wonders if the editors' call for pluralism, "All readings are valuable!," (16) did not take away needed focus. Nevertheless, Littérature et temps colonialis an important part of francophone efforts to rethink colonial literature and is part of a field that should be taken seriously by Anglo-American scholars In addition to the valuable introduction and articles, it includes reproductions of fascinating colonial iconography from the exhibition accompanying the conference and a summary of the conference's debates. This book will interest a broad audience in the field of postcolonial studies and historians of European imperialism. Benjamin Claude Brower...

An Ethnographically Derived Measure of Anxiety, Depression and Somatization: The Phan Vietnamese Psychiatric Scale

This article describes the development and validation of the Phan Vietnamese Psychiatric Scale (PVPS). The PVPS was derived from Vietnamese idioms and cultural understandings of psychiatric and emotional distress identified from the Vietnamese literature and using ethnographic methods. The PVPS consists of a 26-item depression subscale, a 13-item anxiety subscale and a 14-item somatization subscale. Estimates of internal consistency for the three subscales ranged from .87 to .95, with 4-day interval test-retest reliability ranging from .81 to .89. Confirmatory factor analysis supported the subscale structure, with the depression subscale comprising two components 'general mood disturbance' and 'psychovegetative symptoms.' Multitrait-multimeasure analysis supported the construct validity of the scale. The PVPS demonstrated good criterion validity against case assignments by psychiatrists, naturalist healers, and structured diagnostic measures. The PVPS was rated as superior in clinical sensitivity and acceptability in comparison to other related measures.

Land reform in Vietnamese literature

Land reform in Vietnamese literature

Class, Gender and the Representation of Peasant Women in Vietnamese Literature

The paper seeks to explore how peasant women are portrayed in Vietnamese literature and tries to highlight that, throughout the development of Modem Vietnamese literature, the way in which peasant women are portrayed is closely related to political agendas and ideological struggles. It also proposes that the construction of peasant women in Vietnamese literature is not only gender- based, but also class-bound. In the period between 1930 and 1945, the victimisation of peasant women was used as a tool to criticise the colonial administration. In the 1945-75 period, literature took part in mobilising the force of peasant women in the building of a socialist nation. However, post-1975 literature reflected the failure of the Communist government and its Socialist ideology to eradicate the residue of the old values in the country side, including the patriarchal concepts and the kinship system. The post-war writers use the pictures of unhappy women in the remote villages to criticise and ridicule the rhetoric and promises of the revolution.

‘Homosapiens A’ and ‘Homosapiens Z’: Love, Resignation, and Cultural Disorientation in Phạm Th჋ Hoài's Novel Thiên sú

Phạm Th჋ Hoài entered Vietnamese literature on the wings of đổ mói (renovation policy), and soon established herself as one of Vietnam's foremost contemporary writers. Her first novel, Thiên sú (The messenger from heaven), marked her out as an artist who seeks originality and diversity. Renovation in Vietnam gave birth to wide-ranging discussion of many aspects of Vietnamese reality; in the literary sphere, it brought about variety and experimentation resulting from the rejection of the dictates of socialist realism. Phạm Thổ Hoài's work is filled with descriptions of social dislocation, cultural disorientation, and the absurdities of post-war Vietnamese society. She refuses to fit into a mould but pushes creativity to its limits by experimenting with language and style. Her cool, detached narrative voice, with its sharp irony, is well suited to the images of alienation, confusion, and hopelessness she creates. This paper provides a commentary on the novel Thiên sú (although other works are also considered) and examines her writing for what it reveals about postwar Vietnam and its values and attitudes to gender, setting her work in the broader political, social, and cultural context of modern Vietnamese literature.

Langues, écritures et littératures au Viêt-nam

From the 13th century to the beginning of the 20th, Sino-Vietnamese literature coexisted alongside Norn literature. Due to its eminently ideological and political functions, Sino- Vietnamese literature established itself as the standard form of written expression whereas Norn literature, composed entirely in verse, was relegated to the role of entertainment. The author explains this paradoxical situation by the preponderant influence that Chinese language and writing continued to exert on Vietnamese culture a thousand years after its independence, as they permeated the most important institutions of Vietnamese society, affecting ideology, education, mandarinate, and administrative practices. With the use of romanized writing imposed by the French colonial administration, a new literary form based increasingly on prose emerged and rapidly blossomed in the wake of profound social, economic and cultural transformations.