Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation / Edition 1

by David Wyatt

Overview

In a highly original study, David Wyatt takes a broad, yet personal, look at the cultural legacy of the sixties through ten creative figures who came of age during the Vietnam War. Wyatt argues that it is each artist's "personal engagement" with his or her own era that binds together the achievements of storytellers such as filmmaker George Lucas, songwriter Bruce Springsteen, playwright Sam Shepard, journalist Michael Herr, writers Ann Beattie, Alice Walker, Ethan Mordden, Sue Miller, and poets Gregory Orr, and Louise Gluck. For some their work is marked by the war and concerned directly with it; for others, Vietnam represents the prevailing counterculture sensibility often associated with the sixties. Out of the experience new voices emerge—from Michael Herr's landmark invention of a new journalistic voice in his Vietnam War reporting to Bruce Springsteen's tapping of the working class decline in postwar America. The thread that ties the various genres and visions together and that which constitutes Wyatt's own critical aesthetic, is the centrality of the personal response and the seamlessness, therefore, of identity and history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521446891
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/29/1993
Series:	Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture , #66
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments; Introduction: the form of story; Part I. Nostalgia: 1. George Lucas; 2. Bruce Springsteen; Part II. Celebrity: 3. Sam Shepard; 4. Ann Beattie; Part III. Family Romance: 5. Sue Miller; 6. Ethan Mordden; 7. Alice Walker; Part IV. Survival: 8. Gregory Orr; 9. Louise Glück; 10. Michael Herr; Conclusion: people in history; Works read and cited; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...a provocative, compelling, and useful study of artists whose work reflects the sensibilities and politics of the sixties...Out of the Sixties offers important and intelligent insights into both looking at and feeling about that window of experience." Regina Barreca, American Literature

"...Wyatt's essays are remarkably readable and illuminating....What is most joyously liberating in these studies is the nature of Wyatt's engagement—the vibrant personalism of tone and meditation. Wyatt lets his readers know that something is at stake for him in these texts and in the issues they at once respond to and introduce." Philip K. Jackson, Contemporary Literature

From the Publisher