This book examines the critical reception of Vietnam War novels and au-
tobiographies; it does not offer new interpretations, nor does it make a
case for the importance of these texts. By looking at critical reception I
hope to reveal not merely the vicissitudes of literary taste but the ideol-
ogy of literary culture. In recent years, particularly in debates about
canon development, critics have begun to recognize the ideological work
involved in literary reception, but very little has been written on the ide-
ology of contemporary literary culture. My focus on the critical reception
of Vietnam War novels and autobiographies, therefore, is intended to ex-
plain something of the process by which contemporary literary texts
achieve precanonical status and to examine how this process has cohered
with larger cultural forces to further a conservative rewriting of the Viet-
nam War. In tracing the development of a canon of Vietnam War prose
narratives, I examine the sometimes antagonistic, often sympathetic rela-
tionship between commercial and academic literary cultures, and I out-
line how academic literary culture has been transformed in recent years,
identifying the important and often overlooked ideological continuity
between traditional and revisionist literary studies.

I focus on Vietnam War literature for several reasons. First, a per-
sonal one: as a teenager I lived in Bangkok, where I witnessed the dam-
age caused by U.S. use of Thailand as a military staging area and site for
its troops' "rest and recreation." Second, since the writing and reception
of Vietnam War literature took place during the advent of theory and the
revising of literary studies, its reception may reveal whether this trans-
formation in critical practice has meant a comparable transformation in
the ideology of literary culture. Third, as part of a struggle over the rep-
resentation of the Vietnam War, a struggle over what the war meant,
over how and why it was fought, this literature has both reflected and
contributed to the construction of recent historical memory. My concen-
tration on the reception of Vietnam War novels and memoirs rather than
on the texts themselves is an attempt to examine the contours and
processes of ideological hegemony within literary Culture.

Since helicopters lifted off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in

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