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Journal ArticleDOI

"just a creature of his own making": metafiction, identification, and gender in going after cacciato

Anne-Marie Womack
- 01 Jan 2013 - 
- Vol. 59, Iss: 4, pp 811-832
TLDR
In this article, the main character Paul Berlin fantasizes a young Vietnamese refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan and draws attention to Wan as a product of Berlin's imagination, which produces a metafictional construction of authorship and an imaginative construction of cross-gender identification that distance the novel from gender ideologies traditionally associated with war fiction.
Abstract
In Tim O’Brien’s Going after Cacciato , the main character Paul Berlin fantasizes a young Vietnamese refugee named Sarkin Aung Wan. Berlin conjures Wan from generic conventions from the western, the romance, the war story, and most originally in O’Brien scholarship, contemporary depictions of the National Liberation Front’s female peace negotiator Nguyen Thi Binh. This essay suggests that by drawing attention to Wan as a product of Berlin’s imagination, the novel produces a metafictional construction of authorship and an imaginative construction of cross-gender identification that distance the novel from gender ideologies traditionally associated with war fiction.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

TL;DR: In this article, the authors leave blank a blank page intentionally left blank from inquiry to academic writing a text and reader aronson11e fm aronson 11e e m aronson et al.
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How to read literature like a professor : for kids

TL;DR: Author and professor Thomas C. Foster gives tweens the tools they need to become thoughtful readers by explaining the way writers use symbol, metaphor, characterization, setting, plot, and other key techniques to make a story come to life.
Journal ArticleDOI

Tim O’Brien’s “Bad” Vietnam War: Going after Cacciato & Its Historical Perspective

TL;DR: O'Brien's Vietnam War stories are always "bad", meaning that the war contains mostly sad and horrific experience for American soldiers and Vietnamese civilians as mentioned in this paper, but not all online literary analysis websites and peer-reviewed authors can identify or call them all out.
References
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Book

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

TL;DR: In this article, the role of the frontier in the development of the American national character is examined. But the focus of the book is not on the frontier itself, but on the mythologizing of frontier in various commercial genres.
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The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction

TL;DR: Palpable designs: Four American Short Stories An American Dream: Rip Van Winkle Growing Up Male in America: I Want to Know Why Women Beware Science: The Birthmark A Rose for A Rose For Emily 2. A Farewell to Arms: HemingwayOs Resentful Cryptogram 3. The Great Gatsby: FitzgeraldOs droit de seigneur 4. The Bostonians: Henry JamesOs Eternal Triangle 5.
Journal ArticleDOI

Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America

TL;DR: In this article, the authors leave blank a blank page intentionally left blank from inquiry to academic writing a text and reader aronson11e fm aronson 11e e m aronson et al.