Metzger 1

Dan Metzger

Prof. Alex Mueller

ENGL 611

12 March 2013

Curriculum Unit Rationale

Literature of the Vietnam War

In contextualizing the curriculum unit for my final project, I must state my intention to teach these lessons to an upper-level, post-secondary English course centered on American War Literature of the 20th and 21st Century. I envision the course as a 300-level course that would consist of a majority of English majors with the anticipated exception of non-majors interested in the topic and seeking to fulfill a humanities elective. The course seeks to explore theevolution in portrayals of and reactions to American military conflicts from the World War II through the current conflicts in the Persian Gulf. I wish to have the course present a variety of perspectives of the nation’s involvement war: from the perspective of active participants in these conflicts (i.e. soldiers and veterans), journalists, and non-participatory citizens. The literature examined in the course will include short stories, novels, poetry, song lyrics, journalistic nonfiction, memoir, and film.

This curriculum unit will focus on the part of the course devoted to American literature created around the military conflict in Vietnam. One of the main goals of this unit is allow students to explore the relationship between the literary forms of fiction, metafiction, and non-fiction within the context of particularly tumultuous moment in American history. A specific drive in developing my lesson plans will be to orient students’ readings of the selected texts with to Smith and Wilhelm’s “Dimensions of Setting,” (physical, temporal, social and psychological). The question of setting for the selected texts (as well as most literature motivated by trauma) is an essential one to present in this unit, because they nearly all engage with a skewed temporal and physical setting[1], and all deeply engage with the “human dimension” of the social and psychological setting (Smith and Wilhelm 70).

My unit will begin with a few short vignettes written by veteran author Tim O’Brien, which introduces the physical and psychological settings of the conflict. O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” will be used in order to introduce and spark discussion about metafiction. The unit will then introduce new journalistic nonfiction in the form of selections from Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which seeks to depict the war from a non-participatory spectator. Herr was commissioned by Esquireand Rolling Stone as a correspondent on military life in Vietnam and Dispatches is the product of his experiences in-country.These selections will tie into a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which was partially inspired by Dispatches and Kubrick commissioned Herr to co-write. The unit will culminate in the reading of Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green, which will be paired with selections from Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism, namely Hutcheon’s discussion of historiographic metafiction.

My greatest hesitation or concern for this project is that the scope is too large, which raises the following questions:

  • Will I be able to effectively use my ten lesson plans in order to cover all the texts that I would like to teach?
  • Will I also be able to tie all these texts together through Smith and Wilhelm’s various dimensions of setting and still be able to provide enough instruction and about the authors’ use of metafiction and nonfiction when writing about the conflict in Vietnam?
  • Is it appropriate and/or necessary to include Full Metal Jacket in the unit?
  • Meditations in Green is a 300+ page novel…will I be able to teach this? (In my defense, I would really like to provide students with more Vietnam fiction than just Tim O’Brien, who I feel has become the “canonized” Vietnam writer. Wright’s novel can be classified as a historiographic metafiction (as coined by Hutcheon) and fits with the concept of setting for the unit, which I see as a pairing that will provide for fruitful readings and explorations for my students).

Tentative texts for the curriculum unit (and a few yet-to-be-developed ideas):

from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990): “The Things They Carried,” “The Man I Killed,” and “How to Tell a True War Story”

Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977)

Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket(1987)

from Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism

Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983)

A selection of protest songs?

Works Cited

Smith, Michael W. and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements. New

York, Scholastic Inc.: 2010. Print.

[1] It is important to note that while all of the selected texts are set (in part) during the Vietnam War, most of them were written and published many years after the conflict, which will be an essential factor to remind students of while teaching this unit. It will develop an awareness of the importance of temporality in discussing trauma.