This module explores disparate and changing treatments of American identity and purpose from the emergence from World War Two, through the era of the Vietnam War, and up to recent re-evaluations of history, applying a variety of critical approaches and considering crucial social, political and cultural contexts.
War, its aftermath, and processes of return and loss, will serve as overall themes running through the module, but many other concerns will also be discussed. Broadly speaking, we follow a chronology of setting rather than publication date, allowing a fluid, intertextual picture of the United States to emerge, kicking off with work with the Second World War as the recurrent central image, sometimes portraying combat, but with its aftermath always in mind. The difficulties of return and re-assimilation into (or rejection from) the United States are explored from different perspectives, centred on veterans from various communities.
Moving on, fictional treatments of effects of the Vietnam War increasingly become concerned with America's perpetually 'post-war' state, with striking studies of this conflict explored in work haunted not so much by the presence of great historical events but rather by absence and sense of loss. The module ends with more recent engagements with protest and terrorism, possible apocalypse, and with the U.S.’s attitudes towards itself, its history, and its ongoing role in the world.