Chi P. Pham

Thomas Engelbert

This edited book examines how South Vietnam’s (formerly the Republic of Vietnam 1955-1975) literary and journalistic writers were perceived and - potentially - influenced by Western thought, led by thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, Hermann Hesse, Edmund Husserl, Stefan Zweig, Graham Greene, and Somerset Maugham. The book reveals the dynamism and diversity of Western thought in individual literary texts, as well as among the authors themselves. The volume considers how writers and their texts engaged with issues that are socially, culturally, politically, and philosophically significant to Vietnam and beyond, past and present. This approach to South Vietnam’s literary and journalistic tradition enables an alternative plural, inclusive view of the significance of these texts, which are shown to be neither exclusively anti-Communist nor “bourgeois individualist” (cá nhân tiểu tư sản), as they have so often been interpreted both in and outside of Vietnam. Such an interpretation problematically retains the marginal position of South Vietnam’s literature in mainstream Vietnamese literature, and in the literatures of the host countries where these Vietnamese authors have migrated, settled, and continued to write following the 'Fall of Saigon'. This volume presents itself as a key text for those studying Asian and postcolonial literatures, as well as scholars in the humanities researching Vietnam – its history, politics, society, and culture.

The Reception of Western Thought in Journalism and Literature

Reading South Vietnam's Writers

Chitra Sankaran

The fiction chosen for this collection have been in active circulation in Vietnam since 1986, 'The Reform Year', when Vietnamese artists and writers were politically and culturally 'liberated' and engaged with great commitment in criticizing, among other things, the government's environmental policies and ways in which these were enmeshed in economic strategies and schemes for so-called national progress. Thus, modernization and industrialization that were the chosen paths of the postcolonial Vietnamese government, become the major targets of contemporary Vietnamese ecofiction. All these stories, extremely contemporary, emphasise a counter-narrative that challenges socialist goals of development and modernisation. They articulate and affirm a more holistic vision, where man is no longer a predator but a participant of nature. These stories therefore are politically charged and pave the path for a more visionary future.

Contemporary Vietnamese Ecofiction

Revenge of Gaia

Gurpreet Kaur

Ecocriticism in relation to the Southeast Asian region is relatively new. So far, John Charles Ryan’s Ecocriticism in Southeast Asia is the first book of its kind to focus on the region and its literature to give an ecocritical analysis: that volume compiles analyses of the eco-literatures from most of the Southeast Asian region, providing a broad insight into the ecological concerns of the region as depicted in its literatures and other cultural texts. This edited volume furthers the study of Southeast Asian ecocriticism, focusing specifically on prominent myths and histories and the myriad ways in which they connect to the social fabric of the region. Our book is an original contribution to the expanding field of ecocriticism, as it highlights the mytho-historical basis of many of the region’s literatures and their relationship to the environment. The varied articles in this volume together explore the idea of nature and its relationship with humans. The always problematic questions that surround such explorations, such as “why do we regard nature as ‘external’?” or “how is humankind a continuum with nature?”, emerge throughout the volume either overtly or implicitly. As Pepper (1993) points out, what Karl Marx referenced as ‘first’ or ‘external’ nature gave rise to humankind. But humanity “worked on this ‘first’ nature to produce a ‘second’ nature: the material creations of society plus its institutions, ideas and values.” (Pepper, 108). Thus, our volume constantly negotiates this field of ideas and belief systems, in diverse ways and in various cultures, attempting to relate them to the current ecological predicaments of ASEAN. It will likely prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of ecocriticism and, more broadly, of Southeast Asian cultures and literatures.

Chi P. Pham

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