• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.137-160
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• 2014

This study explores postmodernism in Vietnamese literature. While there has been much dispute among critics regarding postmodernism in Vietnamese literature, postmodernism is now thought to be something that cannot be denied. Vietnamese postmodernism has Vietnamese characteristics and is strongly influenced by American literature. The structure of some Vietnamese short stories is similar to that of some American writers. In the writings of Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Ihab Hassan, for example, we find out many characteristics which are ascribed to postmodern Vietnamese literature. We propose the use of the term 'Lao Tzu discourse'which is to include the main concepts of postmodernism such as chaos, nothingness and fragmentation. We propose that postmodern Vietnamese Literature appeared in the 1940s with the collection, Fall Spring Poems (1942), and is also seen with the prose of Nguyen Khai and Nguyen Minh Chau in the 1980s, and the drama written by Luu Quang Vu in the 1980s. There now exists a large group of postmodern Vietnamese writers, like Le Dat, Thanh Thao, Bao Ninh, Cao Duy Son, Nguyen Ngoc Tu and Nguyen Binh Phuong, among others.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.67-90
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• 2024

This article paid attention to three types of children's characters in Vietnamese children's literature in North Vietnam from 1945 to 1975, including children's characters as young soldiers in the frontlines, young citizens in daily life, and role models. The goal of this body of literature was illustrated as educating young generations on patriotism, the revolutionary spirit, and civic consciousness. Our research suggests that politics in children's literature is universal and that the power discourse of adults is an inevitable factor predominating in children's literature. Besides, juxtaposing Vietnamese children's literature with Southeast Asian literature helps us see that the political orientation and moral concepts in children's literature have created a stagnation in the current pace of Vietnamese children's literature. This paper, therefore, contributes to identifying Vietnamese children's literature in the overall picture of Southeast Asian children's literature in the post-colonial context.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.245-270
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• 2023

Many publications of ecocritical research papers and translations of ecocriticism occur in Vietnam in recent years. This paper examines ecocritical scholarly writing in Vietnam, understanding how it corresponds to-reflects and attends to-contemporary Vietnamese society and politics. Specifically, this paper contextualizes Vietnamese ecocriticism in contemporary social and political concerns-embodied in journalistic and administrative documents-about the modernity-oriented postcolonial nation-building of Vietnam. In revealing critiques of political and social degenerations implied in ecocritical writings in Vietnam, this paper suggests that the emergence of ecocriticism in present-day Vietnam indicates a recent "political turn." More importantly, such emergence reflects and engages with the continuing Marxist perspective of literature as an instrument for social criticism and cultural revolution in Vietnam. Vietnamese ecocritics bear the mission of prophets of the time, public educators, and soul engineers, writing is an act of engaging with and influencing reality. Writing (literary and scholarly) still forms an idealized ideological instrument in the struggles for national homogeneity and sovereignty and social democracy in present-day Vietnam.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.9-29
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• 2022

Postcolonial critics have criticized Comparative Literature for exclusively studying literatures from the non-Western world through Western lenses. In other words, postcolonial criticism asserts that theorists and practitioners of comparative literature have traced the "assistance" of the classic "comparison and contrast" approach to an imperialist discourse, which sustains the superiority of Western cultures and economies. As a countermeasure to reading through the comparative lens, literary theories have offered a "juxtapositional model of comparison" that connects texts across cultures, places, and times. This paper examines practices of Comparative Literature in Vietnam, revealing how the engagement with decolonizing processes leads to a knowledge production that is paradoxically colonial. The paper also analyses implementations of this model in reading select Vietnamese works and highlights how conventional comparisons, largely based on historical influences and reception, maintain the colonial mapping of World Literature, centralizing Western, and more particularly, English Literature and in the process marginalizing the others. Therefore, the practice of juxtaposing Vietnamese literary works with canonical works of the World Literature will provoke dialogues and raise awareness of hitherto marginalized works to an international readership. In this process, the paper considers the contemporary interest of Comparative Literature practice in trans- national, trans-regional, trans-historical, and trans-cultural perspectives.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.7-33
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• 2023

Numerous journalistic and literary writings about the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian awardee of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913), appeared in newspapers of colonial Vietnam. His stop-over in Saigon (Cochin China) in 1929 created political discussions in contemporary journalism and other publications. Tagore and his visit to Saigon inspired Vietnamese intellectuals and stirred diverse anti-colonial thought. This paper examines writings and images about Tagore in colonial Vietnamese journals and newspapers, reconstructing how intellectuals recalled and imagined him as they also engaged with anti-colonial thought, particularly anti-colonial modernity and anti-capitalism. Contextualizing the reception of Tagore in colonial projects of modernizing the Vietnamese colony, the paper argues that discussions inspired by Tagore's visit embody contemporary nationalist ideology.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.135-159
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• 2021

Thơ mới (Vietnamese New Poetry, 1932-1945) is a literary movement in colonial Vietnam that is broadly considered to have marked the modernization of Vietnamese literature. This paper examines depictions about natural disasters, ecological wounds, and about relationships between humans and nature in New Poetry, asking how those descriptions reflect social and political issues in colonial Vietnam. The paper argues that ecocriticism, developed in Western academy, brought to the New Poetry Movement new meanings, associated with a material world. That is the specific reality of colonial Vietnam in the early twentieth century, when the colonial modernization resulted in natural and social collapses in the area. This approach is especially significant, given that New Poetry is largely seen as the embodiment of the expansion of Western romanticism by Vietnamese scholars. Moreover, in examining Thơ mới (Vietnam) from perspective of ecocriticism, this paper extends the ecocritical approach to non-Western literatures. Specifically, although ecocriticism developed in the West, particularly in United States and England, it has become an effective approach to non-Western literatures, particularly since the early twentieth first century. In this context, Asian literatures, particularly Southeast Asian literatures, potentially offer ecocriticism new meanings, many of which are associated with local social and political conditions and histories.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.91-113
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• 2024

Since the last years of the twentieth century, the approach to children's literature from ecocriticism has been discussed in academic fora around the world, especially in the US and Europe. In Southeast Asia, with the foundation of the ASEAN Association of Environment and Literature in 2016, there have been scholarly discussions about the capacity of children's literature to enhance ecological awareness in the region. In Vietnam, since the early years of the 21st century, with the increasing reception of ecocriticism from outside, children's literary works have become the subject of ecocriticism. This article examines scholarly works approaching children's literature in Vietnam, pointing out how they elucidate messages about environmental education. By studying Vietnamese ecocritical scholarship of various types including research, commentaries, and criticism on children's literature, this article argues that ecological education is a prominent feature in the relationship between ecocriticism and children's literature in Vietnam. As such, Vietnamese ecocriticism of children's literature shares the prominent argument of international materials on children's literature and ecocriticism, particularly in Southeast Asia.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.169-184
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• 2019

In recent years, Vietnamese literature has seen the rise of women writers in a genre traditionally dominated by men-travel writing. Phuong Mai, Huyen Chip, Dinh Hang, among others, are just a few who have introduced innovations to this genre. This paper investigates the practice of contemporary Vietnamese women travel-writers and how they differ in perception compared to their male counterparts. One of the most crucial differences is that women perform cultural embodiment, employing their bodies instead of their minds. An encounter of the woman writer with other cultures is, therefore, an encounter between the body and the very physical conditions of culture, which leads to a will to change, to transform, more than a desire to conquer, to penetrate the other. Utilizing the concept deterritorialization developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this paper argues that despite being deemed fragile and without protection, women's bodies are in fact fluid and able to open new possibilities of land and culture often stripped away by masculinist ideology.

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.7-8
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• 2022

• SUVANNABHUMI
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.155-185
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• 2023

This paper aims to identify the shifts of masculine domination, illuminating Vietnamese men and women's actual position in society through surveying the mixed and hybrid characteristics described in the feminist texts in the early twentieth century. This paper concentrates on the feminist writings of the two exceptionally male intellectuals Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh (1882-1936) and Phan Khôi (1887-1959). in order to implement these goals, the paper first examines the popular phenomenon of ventriloquism among Vietnamese male intellectuals, whose dominant attitudes may still be unveiled in feminist texts. Secondly, the paper focuses on surveys of men's direct discourse in constructing the model of women's liberation. From these two contents, this paper answers the following questions: Why have Vietnamese men become feminists? What were the causes, purposes, and effects of this phenomenon? To look at the nature of Vietnamese feminism, this paper will show the shifts of masculine domination in Vietnam as another form of protecting men's privileges. All analyses in this study will ground discussion on the economic, political, and social contexts and conditions of Vietnam in the early twentieth century.