"The works of Tim O'Brien are among the most significant recent contributions to a lengthy canon of war literature," write the editors of this volume; they serve "as an ideal point of entry for discussions of war and its human impact." The author of the highly acclaimed The Things They Carried, O'Brien is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of a National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. This volume in the Approaches to Teaching series considers the range and depth of O'Brien's writing, with an emphasis on works that focus on the Vietnam War. Part 1, "Materials," provides information on O'Brien's life and an overview of his literary output. It also directs readers to critical and reference works on subjects encountered in his writing. The twenty-three essays in part 2, "Approaches," provide historical background on the Vietnam War; explore narrative issues in O'Brien's works, such as the melding of fiction, nonfiction, and memoir; and suggest ideas for teaching the author's works in a variety of classroom and conceptual settings (e.g., composition, American literature, war fiction, narrative theory, postmodernism).
Alex Vernon is associate professor of English at Hendrix College. He is the author of Soldiers Once and Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien; On Tarzan; Most Succinctly Bred; and The Eyes of Orion: Five Tank Lieutenants in the Persian Gulf War. He is the editor of Arms and the Self: War, the Military, and Autobiographical Writing. Catherine Calloway is professor of English at Arkansas State University. She is a regular contributor to American Literary Scholarship: An Annual and has published widely on Vietnam War literature, especially on the work of O'Brien, and in such forms as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Tampa Review, Bulletin of Bibliography, and essay collections.
"This plurality among contributors and potential readers offsets any redundancy in the target texts. Without question, Carried, Cacciato, and Lake of the Woods deserve most of the attention because they are O'Brien's strongest books, and his questions of reliability and war fiction his most enduring concerns. These are the issues most pressing for students in an era of two wars and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and the outlying methods provide enough diversity to make Approaches an effective tool for introducing the author to a range of educational contexts." --Joseph George, University of North Carolina at Greensboro "This new Approaches collection is both for aficionados of Tim O'Brien (and Vietnam literature) and for those with somewhat broader literary interests. I have nothing but glowing praise for its substantial achievement." --David Jarraway, University of Ottawa
