Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, September 9, 2003 |
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Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, September 9, 2003
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| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, September 3, 2003 |
| Creator |
Brizuela, Leopoldo Jeong, Han Yong, 1958- Bielik-Robson, Agata Ly Hoàng Ly, 1975- |
| Creator - Nationality |
Argentine Polish South Korean Vietnamese |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2003-09-03 |
| Description | Leopoldo Brizuela says the way his imagination works is "not on reality itself, but on representation of reality: moreover, not on the words or images that represent reality, but on their silences, on their voids." Jeong Han-Yong applies the topic to the digital realm, considering the actions of avatars of 2004 in Sims Online and LambdaMOO, relating the famous story about "cyber rape" from the latter. Agata Bielik-Robson considers what psychoanalysis might have to impart on our knowledge of fantasy and literature's desire for it. Hoang Ly uses fantasy to develop her poetry, citing dreams, religion, and applying a poetic lens on real events. |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | Leopoldo Brizuela Fantasy and Reality Some days ago, our friend the writer Gabor Szanto said that, being a “realist writer”, he feels alone in the Hungarian literary milieu. He described most of Hungarian writers of fiction as “postmodern” –and I suppose that this label served Gabor to name some kind of non-realist fiction. This statement of his struck me, not only because I also feel quite alone in the literary Argentinean milieu; but also because my writing is “non realistic”, and I have been called, very often, “a postmodern”. Unlike Gabor, who did not suggest any political implication in his description, certain critics and writers have accused me of escaping from reality, from political commitment. Since I am neither a critic nor a literary theorist, I will try to show you how I feel about the apparent antithesis implicit in the title of the panel, and I will try to show it, of course, by telling you a story. In my three books of fiction, Patagonia, a place where I’ve never been, is the background, and as it usually happens with the most important aspects of my life, I cannot explain really why. The first answer that comes to my mind is this. My father, who was a sailor, traveled at least once a month, during almost thirty years, to that “uttermost part of the earth”. And thus the names he included in his rather laconic stories –names like Ushuaia, a city, Bahia Desolation, a bay, or the terrible Cape Horn, appeared in my life, awakened my imagination, with all the glamour, the almost sacred prestige of our fathers’ work when we are children. I remember climbing the ladder of the huge ship with the feeling of entering a temple –not a profane temple at all, although its goddess was Patagonia. It was ten or twelve years later when I began to read passionately any book I could find about those southern seas –Moby Dick was my bible, but Joseph Conrad was my guru. I wanted to know, I suppose, everything about my father’s experiences and, especially, his feelings towards me. But very soon I discovered that most of seamen in both fiction and real chronicles, never remember their family. When I published my novel Inglaterra, a fable (Inglaterra is the Spanish name for England), someone told me that I had wanted to write a typical southern seas novel, populated, however, by all the characters that never appear in Conrad’s books. And I thought that this was indeed so. In fact, that is the way my imagination works: not on reality itself, but on representation of reality: moreover, not on the words or images that represent reality, but on their silences, on their voids. Now, as you probably know, Patagonia is a name given to that “uttermost part of the earth” by a member of one the first expeditions of conquerors at the beginning of the 16th century. When this Antonio Pigafetta suddenly saw on the shore an Indian, a very big one in fact, of the tehuelche pueblo, he remembered a certain giant from a chivalrous romance called Patagon, and concluded crazily that he had really seen one. Now, this kind of misunderstanding, almost fifty years later, would be the very essence of Don Quixote’s folly, who mistook real persons and places of the real life of Castillia and Catalonia for characters and backgrounds of the chivalrous romances he also adored. But what I want to point out is that, four centuries later, that place of imagination, Patagonia, has become real, an aftermath of the struggle between that typically western imagination of the pioneers, and that of the aboriginal peoples. In fact, the stories of the inhabitants of the “uttermost part of the earth” are so bewildering, so wonderful, that many writers –me among them- feel today inclined to represent them in their fiction. After five centuries, Patagonia is one of the most wonderful 1 kingdoms of literature –where my imagination lives too. And that’s another very good example of how fantasy interacts with reality, or moreover, of the way reality and fantasy are entangled, so that it frequently becomes impossible to say what is real and what is imagination. But why have I chosen Patagonia, then? Why Patagonia and not one of the countless ports of the southern seas –Buenos Aires, for example where I have lived for almost all my life and which I certainly adore? I think that the reason is this: in the Western imagination, deeply and wonderfully shattered by the discovering of America, Patagonia inherited the prestige that Portugal or Iceland had had before. After Columbus, Patagonia became the farthest shore man could reach, the last territory to be conquered both by sword and knowledge. And I found in that image of the western fantasy a wonderful metaphor of the work of the poet: we all write on the border, confronted, like pioneers, with all the things we cannot give a name, that is: with all the impossibilities of our language, and of any human language perhaps. Now, as we all know, it is not only in the meaning of the words of a story that we can appreciate how an author sees the world: also the structure of that story reflects the architecture he intuits under the chaotic surfaces of reality, beyond the confused perceptions of our senses. And most frequently, neither meaning nor structure are entirely created by a storyteller: they are the inheritance of a certain literary tradition, the rules of one adopted genre. Realism as a genre that can be quite precisely dated in history of literature, proposes a vision of the world which I could not accept as mine: beginning to write I felt that realism, at least that kind of realism that was the main trait of Argentinean literature of that moment, during the dictatorship, left too many things out –too many things unspoken, to many things aching and anxious to be redeemed by words. Thus I began to adopt for my writing ideas and techniques of any “non realistic” story I could find –from (and especially) the fairy tales to fantasy/science fiction fables, from the gothic of Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter to the Indian myths of America, from the fantastic literature of Borges to the romantic German novellas. By becoming less and less realist, I intended to be more faithful to our reality –which is composed not only of our external actions and superficial thoughts, but also of the dreams and all the aspects of the unconscious mind. Every time I tried to reflect in a realistic way, for instance, the life of the families of the 30.000 desaparecidos, disappeared persons, during the dictatorship, I failed. But while I was trying to imagine, in Ingelterra, the Indian genocide by the mercenaries of the international trading companies and the Argentine army, at the end of the 19th century, I was so concerned about concrete details –colors, sounds, smells, tastes, etc-that my deepest feelings and thoughts and memories came naturally and powerfully into my story. It is always like that. If I try to tell you who am I, and although I am quite an sincere person, I lie, because I am under control. If I subject myself, or, if you want, I surrender to fantasy, then my whole reality appears. So, let’s tell another story. 2 Jeong, Han-Yong Fantasy and Reality Let’s begin with a story in Chuang Tzu’s For the All Things. “Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Tzu. Soon I awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.” This story is often cited as an example for the confusion or the mixture between reality and fantasy. Even when we are not sleeping, we can imagine escaping far away beyond this real world. We can transcend from this world to that dream fantasy by imagination. Like this, I think that literature is the result of a desire to transform the real world through the tool of imagination. According to Lacan, literature is the way to try to find out ‘the alter ego.’ But now we must consider how the imagination is different from the fantasy. In the preface of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge tried to put an emphasis on the value of the imagination, and regarded fantasy as a bad literary tool. Such an opinion stands on the prior condition that the imagination is different from fantasy completely, and that he can divide them actually. But because they are all results of the same mental process, we cannot distinguish the imagination from the fantasy, nor determine which is more valuable. We just get a hint that the imagination must lie on the reality, and that the fantasy must be careful not to contain the unreliable ground. As shown in the Coleridge’s case, though romanticism tried to reject fantasy, ‘romantic escape’ means not the overcoming, but the abandoning of reality. For all that, in the realism which was followed by romanticism, the fantasy was also regarded as a kind of a useless device. Most realists thought that it would be far away from the essence of the real life. The fantasy was a taboo in the works of Balzac or Thomas Hardy. Now we all know that fantasy and reality was not a contradiction. Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Marques, and Jose Saramagu locatedthe point where these two enemies meet, waving white flags. The blind men’s city that Saramagu made up does not exist in this world, nor does the Buendes Family Marques made up. To create the surrealistic situation beyond real life included the fantasy as well as the imagination. That is, they found out that fantasy could be a good allegory through which to reflect reality. Borges played with the idea that concrete reality may consist only of mental perceptions. The ‘real world’ is only one possible in the infinite series of realities. These themes were examined among others in the classical short stories. In ‘La Biblioteca de Babel’ the symmetricallly structured library represents the universe 3 as it is conceived by rational man, and the library's illegible books refers to man's ignorance. In ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ Borges invented a whole other universe based on an imaginary encyclopedia. The narrator says: “Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.” If so, is fantasy only an aid for reality? Now everything has changed a lot. Our time is proceeding toward the postmodern society from the realistic circumstance of the modern society. In such a view, we are approaching the point that a great change is required in the literary style of the novel, because the novel is the typical literary form produced by the modern period. A new style excluding reality completely, such as the Matrix series, or the Harry Potter series, becomes a powerful device that makes our pure desire come true. The postmodern paradigm emphasizes parts, not the whole. The sum of the parts does not make the whole, but the whole can be materialized within parts. The term ‘Beat-Bang,’ referring to the digital revolution, can be explained exactly as the relationship between parts and the whole. The beat is the unit that has no sound, smell, or weight, but that moves as fast as the speed of light. This small unit is leading the revolution of the world. This change is reversing the relationship between society and the individual. The modern rule of the realistic society must perish, and be replaced by fantasy. Having crossed through the postmodern society, we are now arriving in the digital and cyber period. In cyberspace we can all be Chuang Tzu’s butterflies. Let me give you an example. ‘Simms On-line’ is a so-called ‘life simulation’ game that can reproduce the real world in cyberspace. Everyone lives there as ‘an avatar,’ the other ego. In the cyber city, lovers look for the romantic beach to enjoy dates, and kiss and embrace, and they can even have sex with each other. With getting fantasy and reality confused, our relationship with other people is changing. Here is one more example. ‘RamdaMoo’ is a kind of text-based online game. Mr. Bungle, an avatar, raped two other female avatars, and other online users prosecuted him. This was followed by an extensive debate in the cyber world. Some people said they had no right to punish him, while others said that he should be punished in the real world. The case came to end with the conclusion that he was banished from the network. Although some people say that these online human relationships are vacant and valueless, more net users are willing to enter cyberspace and to be ‘digital butterflies.’ Now fantasy is mingled with digital reality, and dominates our bodies as well as our imaginations. We cannot distinguish fantasy from reality any longer in this Matrix world. The Iowa City Public Library Wednesday, Sep. 3, 2003 4 Agata Bielik-Robson The Future of a Fantasy What is fantasy? Is this any kind of fiction, any kind of a fabricated image of which we know that it has no place in the real world? Such definition would make fantasy a concept far too broad, and as such rather uninteresting. In order to make it fruitful, we should try to contrast it with another, closely related category whose function will reveal itself as, in fact, completely different: namely, illusion. When Sigmund Freud wrote his famous critique of religious phenomena and called it Future of an Illusion, he made his intentions very clear from the onset: religious belief is nothing but an illusion, an illusion of being parented by an omnipotent being, fabricated by mankind in order to survive in the hostile and unyielding universe. But what the father of psychoanalysis could say about the future of a fantasy? Would he be equally dismissive? Probably not, he would have to admit that fantasies are more vital and significant to human beings than sheer illusions. But why, really? This is precisely what I will try to explain to you. So, what is the difference between fantasy and illusion, and what is their respective relation to reality? In psychoanalysis, as well as in the general usage of the word, „illusion“ has a definitely negative connotation. It describes a state of deception of senses and understanding as to the real nature of the world: to be deluded - the word „delusion“ is closely related to it - means not to be able to see the reality. Worse, it may also conceal - as it is revealed by Freud’s demystifing efforts - an unconscious, or, perhaps, only superficially suppressed, wish not to see reality as it is, that is, to engage into delusion which takes the form of a self-deception, or, as Sartre called it a mauvaise foi. This Sartrian term, „bad faith“ is especially useful here for it shows that illusions rarely involve deep psychical defences, like repression, but remain on the level of shallow suppressions operating within the subconscious domain of a rather superficial self-deception. The definition of „fantasy“ is precisely the opposite: its relationship with reality is far more complex than in the case of illusion, and its status within the psychical apparatus is based on the strongest repressions possible, leading to the very depths of the unconscious. It is true that fantasy does not refer to the reality as we know it; that it is wholly in the service of the Pleasure Principle. On the other hand, however, it doesn’t merely hide some unpleasant aspects of the world, as it is in the case of illusion. Its function is more specific. It consists in denying the conditions which had thwarted realisation of some important desire, and thus it allows its satisfaction in effigie, i.e., in the sphere of the imaginary. We could resort here to the famous distinction coined by William Blake, between negation and contrariness; while illusion merely negates, and as such posits itself within the logical sphere of stiff oppositions, fantasy’s power consists in its provocative, adversary attitude towards the rigidity of the former. Illusion’s weakness lies in its attempt to compete with the principle of reality; it tries to makes a cognitive claim about the world and while it wants to satisfy some of our frustrated wishes (like, e.g. a wish to be parented by an omnipotent being, which, according to Freud, leads to coining of the religious illusion), it always has to do it in compromise with the Reality Principle. This is because illusion and truth compete within the same domain, the domain of the one and only reality. Whereas fantasy, using the strategy of contrariness, wants, in fact, much more. It attempts to trick the real - not to negate but to deceive it ��� and thus avoid any compromise with the constraints of Realitätsprinzip. By refusing to comply with its imposition of the one and only real world, it sets an opposite realm which becomes a crux of a quite new, adversary kind of subjective reality. So, while illusions usually require no more than just a superficial self-deception, some measure of a „bad faith“, in order to reach their compromise within the conflicting principles of pleasure and reality, fantasies have to be 5 repressed far deeper and, in consequence, use a different, more autonomous and more vivid means of expression. Thus, illusions usually occur in the sphere of perception and conceptualisation, whereas fantasies operate in the domain of an alternative reality: reveries, day-dreaming, sudden tides of vivid imaginations. According to Freud, fantasies are incomparably more significant to the working of human psyche than illusions: they constitute the hardest core of what he calls a „psychical reality“. This paradox - „psychical reality“ being made of fantasies which openly defy reality - is one of his greatest discoveries. It reveals antithetical nature of the human self which is based - to paraphrase Max Stirner - on even less than nothing. The images it uses to set itself against the world and thus establish itself in its existence are not just unreal: they defy reality, thus making place for something which Emerson, a great figure of American romanticism, called a „golden impossibility“, a subject whose existence not only wasn’t prepared by the world as it is but seems completely improbable. In Freud’s implicit formulation - and I take him here to be also one of the latest descendants of the romantic lineage - the existence of the subject is something that defies laws of the Principle of Reality: it should not have taken place, it has no natural right to emerge. In order to set itself through all the obstacles sent by the world to annihilate a rising new psyche, man has to recourse to fantasies: to build the core of its antithetical „psychical reality“ on the denial of the real. Strong „narcissistic fantasies“, in which the psyche denies its condition of dependence and sports a self-image of magical autonomy and omnipotence, are, in fact, her first defence against the world, her first „protective shield“, and, simultaneously, her act of origin. At the same time, they are the very source of the fantastical world of the romantic literature which protects primary, magical fantasmata against the intrusion of the real, disenchanted world. The very term psychische Realität appears already in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams where it indicates all those factors within human psyche which resist an easy access of self-conscious introspection. In opposition to the Cartesian line which traditionally associates subjectivity with transparent self-knowledge and internal plasticity, Freud defines “psychical reality” in analogy with physical reality whose most distinctive feature is its opaqueness and resistance. Thus, the term “psychical reality”– say Laplanche and Pontalis – “is often used be Freud to designate whatever in the subject’s psyche presents a consistency and resistance comparable to those displayed by material reality; fundamentally, what is involved here is unconscious desire and its associated fantasies”. The psychical reality, therefore, is a set of those psychic elements which “take on the force of reality”. And the elements which take on this force of reality are nothing else but the primordial fantasies: the inner imaginarium which pictures the fulfilment of first and strongest desires. It is those fantasms which set the most thorough resistance to conscious reflection; as such, they fill the deepest core of psychic being. “If we look at unconscious wishes reduced to their most fundamental and truest shape - writes Freud in reference to primal fantasies - we shall have to conclude, no doubt, that psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.”1 Fantasy is thus not just a fantasy; not just a feeble phantom which dissolves in confrontation with harsh reality, but a formula of an alternative being which arises in adversary attitude towards the principle of reality. If it weren‘t for this original conflict with the reality principle, the „psychical reality“ could not constitute itself in its autonomy. Thus, what prima facie may seem a weak and purely defensive fantasm, standing no chance towards the overwhelming power of the real world, becomes, in fact, a paradoxical source of creation. For if it weren‘t for the adversary boldness of fantasies against the real, the psychic being could never achieve 1 Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, in: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. V, London 1953-1973, p. 620. 6 even the lowest degree of autonomy, and thus could never constitute itself as a separate subject. Romanticism was the first movement in the history of Western thought which spotted the vital importance of fantasy, creating a world boldly and defiantly opposed to what Blake used to call “a universe of death”, the disenchanted, modern reality of Newtonian physics. Romantics did no want to contend themselves with mere illusions: they consciously chose a more provoking trope of the fantastical. Long before Freud, who merely codified this romantic knowledge, they discovered that fantasies, fulfilling desires which are overtly impossible, do not compete with reality, they challenge reality as such, thus refusing to comply with the principle other than pure pleasure of instantaneous gratification. The romantics, living in the age of progressing disenchantment, reclaimed the use of fantasies as a primordial means of psychical defence against the offences of external reality: witnessing shattering of many illusions under the influence of modern science, they invested in the fantastical. So, it is thanks to fantasies - and not just simply illusions - that they have managed, in Novalis�� words, „to romanticise the world“. They fought for the right to fantasize (not to be mistaken with the right to be deluded) not only for the sake of whim, but with an intense sense of necessity: they filled their rhetoric with fantasies, convinced that human subject would not be able to survive without their beneficial influence in the world increasingly more deprived of magic and warmth. Let me repeat again: illusion is a weak, defensive compromise, yet fantasy manages to challenge reality in its most threatening aspect. Thus, the fantasy of science-fiction, the most popular contemporary genre using the rhetoric of the fantastical, challenges the most threatening aspect of the modern reality which is its scientifically mortified view of nature as, to use Blake’s words again, the fallen domain of Satanic Mills. Transforming science by fantasy was already a favourite romantic trope: the prose of Novalis, Kleist and E.T.A. Hoffman visibly anticipates the High S-F style of such writers as H.P. Lovecraft or, nowadays, the French admirer of Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq. The romanticisation of the world is therefore the process which is still going on, and, unlike Freudian illusions, seems to have a secure future. 7 Hoang Ly FANTASY AND REALITY Everyone knows that fantasy is built on some foundation of reality. Fantasy is the association from one sense to other sense (Ex: the house is as large as the sound of the gong ringing – Poetry epic Dam San, a hero of Tay Nguyen, mountain region in the center of VN). Most of fantasy in artistic creation is an extension, an exaggeration or a metaphor of reality. It is the case of my poem, “The woman and the old house”. The poem is inspired by the great house of my grandfather and I have dedicated my poem to it (house #14). It is a famous old house in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital. The house was devastated heavily by time and historical events. It is a very sad story. And I was born in this house. “… Underneath the mirror-like sparkling plank-bed Is the night of the last century Underneath the mirror-like sparkling plank-bed Cockroaches wag their antennae and sniff��� ……. “The woman dressed in her white tunic sits cross-legged Draining dry her eyes to absorb the night Slow and steady her body disintegrates Draining dry her eyes soaking up thousands of rainfalls The old house is submerged in crying…” The night dream is one form of fantasy. It makes deformed fragments of reality and collects them into a story that translates our wishes. I can say that I am a “dreamy” person, because I have a lot of dreams. Some of them are fantastic, some of them are frightening, some of them are funny, and most of them are dreams of flying up. I made a series of paintings about my dreams, and I have shown them in my first exhibition entitled “Dreams”. I also express my dreams in poems. One of them relates a dream in which I grew wings, transformed into a bird and flew up. Through that poem, I expressed my conflict between the wish to become a bird flying away and the reality that I am a human living in this noisy life with limited frames of society. “I dream I’ve a beautiful pair of wings made of pellucid silk kind of dreamy silk as transparent as when you look deep into my eyes…” 8 Fantasy also attaches to the awareness about religion. The Vietnamese culture is influenced strongly by spiritualism and Buddhism. We believe in fate, and in omens, and in the existence of a “yin world” with damned souls. But we also have the will to counteract bad fate. So in my poems, the haunting of spirits is intertwining with the will of resisting, to affirm my personality (ex: the poems “The ghost butterfly” and “Night Number 2). My poetry usually departs from emotions in my real life. But I invest in poetry my own way of seeing reality, of making the associations based on the real. Take the poem “ The Mekong river is flowing.” It was inspired by a trip on the MeKong River, during this time we heard the news of the Iraq war’s bursting out. At that moment I felt the roll of the river associated with the pain emerging in my heart. Fantasy in my poetry used to come from some concrete thing or image of the reality. Sometimes I depict the real through my own vision that transforms it. Sometimes, I just use it as a support to develop my fantasy. Take the poem “The ghost butterfly”. It is true that a ghost-butterfly was flying into my studio one day. A lot of Vietnamese think ghost-butterflies carry the dead’s soul, others say they are bad omens. So seeing that butterfly , right away I associated it with my worriment about love. The poem is a dialogue of “you” – an imagined character – and the character “I”, with the real ghost butterfly as an intermediary. At that moment, the ghost-butterfly incarnated the bad omen of love trouble. Fantasy and reality confused one another and became one. The ghost butterfly became the cause for me to empty my heart. I gave it a presumed role: “You said the butterfly would bring bad luck”, then I resist it: “I carelessly brushed my hand across my face My hand covered with paint The different colors streaked my cheek Frightened The ghost butterfly Took flight” Now I am going to finish my second book of poetry entitled “The night is flowing towards the sky”. It is written completely about night: my fantasy, imagination, thoughts of the night, my inspiration on the night. It is a collection of different portraits of the night drawn by me. Everybody used to see the night as darkness, as the sleeping time of the world. But try to sit here and imagine, have your fantasy about night. What will you see then? What color does the night have? How does it look? What happens in the night? The night can be a round, or 9 a square, it is small or big, has smell or no smell. You can image and create the night your own way. In fact, the power of imagination could lead us to the irrational point when our emotion comes to the utmost so that our feelings pass through reality. I have seen different faces of the night. I can see the night during the day in the sunshine. I can feel the night in my heart. It becomes the thing upon my palm, I can put it on my hair, on my refrigerator, on my bed, on the tank in the battle-field, on the dead and living, on you, on the book I am writing. The night can be placed on my tongue. I swallow it or pronounce it: night. I pronounce it softly, then more loudly, then I shout: NIGHT. You see, the night is immense around us, right now. So, what really is the night? Are you sure that you know it? When I set to write, nothing is fantasy, nothing is reality, it is simply what is appearing in my mind that forces me to write. I don’t care whether it is fantasy or reality, but I have to, with my own language of poetry, analyze the “AND” of what I must write down. The theme of my work is always about the complicated internal life of Vietnamese women in a society that is on its way to overcoming the bounds of the past, heading towards women’s liberation and gender equality. I want to express the contrast between "revolt" will and "acceptance" habits of Vietnamese modern women. They sometimes want to deform their "hut of fate", but in the end, they listen back to their sacrifice vocation that is the heritage of generations of Vietnamese women. Vietnamese Literature 10 The Vietnamese people traditionally nurture a great love for literature. Up to the 19th century, most Vietnamese literary works had been in the form of either poetry or rhythmic prose. Many dissertations, appeals to the people made by patriots, heroes, kings and lords are considered reputed masterpieces. Particularly, the 3,000-verse epic Kieàu, a masterpiece by Nguyeãn Du (1766-1820), is so famous that almost all Vietnamese people know by heart some of its verses. Most of the poetry and prose in the past was written in Haùn and Noâm. Along with the written literature, the rich and diverse oral literature has significantly contributed to the spiritual life of the people, especially of laborers. From 1945 to 1975, Vietnamese literature focused mainly on the people’s heroism to mobilize the masses in the struggle against foreign aggression and for national reunification. Since 1986, Vietnamese literature has experienced a “renovation” process. In particular, short stories on diversified themes have had much success and drawn the attention of readers inside and outside Vietnam. Many of them have been translated into foreign languages, such as English, French, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, etc. 11 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
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| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, September 9, 2003 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving Image |
| Type (IMT) | mp4 |
| Duration | 01:20:44 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2003 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_9-3-03.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_9-3-03.mpg |
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