Seeking Reference Help Re Sentimentality
From mjanette@ksu.edu Wed Jun 30 09:26:30 2004
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 10:40:12 -0500
From: mjanette <mjanette@ksu.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: seeking reference help re sentimentality
Dear VSG Members,
I hope you all can help me: I'm looking for references to books or other resources to better understand Vietnamese attitudes towards sentimentality (or towards what westerners call sentimentality). I'd also be happy to investigate related topics like romance, privileging of personal relationships, the relationship between emotionality and thought or behavior, etc.
The project I'm working on concerns a novel from 1965, so I'm especially interested in works that address attitudes and beliefs of that period or earlier.
Unfortunately, my Vietnamese is still pretty abysmal, so I would have to be reading this in English, or possibly French.
I very much appreciate any advice or direction you could provide.
Thanks in advance,
Michele Janette
Associate Professor
English Department
Kansas State University
mjanette@ksu.edu
From dduffy@email.unc.edu Wed Jun 30 09:26:35 2004
Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 12:49:14 -0400
From: Dan Duffy <dduffy@email.unc.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: seeking reference help re sentimentality
There is lots of explicit discourse in Vietnamese about how the private feelings people have about other people take part in the social order, and vice-versa. Is that what you're interested in? The people who set up the first modern presses and newspapers and publishing houses and wrote and edited and published and read "poems" and "novels" as we think of them today discussed sentiment all the time, and the conversation has never ended.
I have two suggestions of easily available works of scholarship. Niel Jamieson's history of Vietnamese literature, aka Understanding Viet Nam, focuses on these moderns, their acitivities and intentions. Helle Rydstrom's Embodying Morality lays out the social reality of feelings between the genders there, deep in the countryside, far from the print world.
But really, it's all over the novels and short stories and poems, including just about any English translation you've got. Le Luu's A Time Far Past from U Mass Press begins with an arranged marriage in the 50s and follows the groom through the present day for a historicized narrative of romance in Vietnamese life. Duong Thu Huong's Paradise of the Blind from Morrow gives the structure of feelings of a young woman in relation to her mother and her aunt over the same period.
What the English-language scholarship can tell you, if you can't sit down with 20 Vietnamese books and skim them, is that the concern with sentiment you will find in Duong Thu Huong and Le Luu takes part in a discourse that is as explicit and self-conscious as current US anthropology on the social construciton of feelings from Cathy Lutz and Dorothy Hollland. The Vietnamese discourse on feelings is very readily comparable to what scholars in English and History departments have documented going on with "sentiment" in the 18 and 19C in Britain, except of course it happened in the 20C and is happening now in Viet Nam.
I hope you get a lot more answers, this is something VN scholars know about -
Dan Duffy
From mjanette@ksu.edu Wed Jun 30 09:26:42 2004
Date: Sat, 12 Jun 2004 17:40:13 -0500
From: mjanette <mjanette@ksu.edu>
Reply-To: vsg@u.washington.edu
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Subject: RE: help re sentimentality
Thanks to Dan and Helle for your suggestions about where I can begin reading -- it turns out my library even has copies of both _Understanding Viet Nam_ and _Embodying Morality_!
And I appreciate your comment, Dan, that
"What the English-language scholarship can tell you, if you can't sit down with 20 Vietnamese books and skim them, is that the concern with sentiment you will find in Duong Thu Huong and Le Luu takes part in a discourse that is as explicit and self-conscious as current US anthropology on the social construciton of feelings"
-- that is actually exactly what I was wondering, but I didn't want to go presuming that American scholarship about western culture would just apply to a novel by a Vietnamese immigrant. It is exactly that explicit and self-conscious discourse that I'd like to be able to refer to, first hand -- or as close as I can get.
Thanks again,
Michele