UC San Diego

In the context of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath, I engage in close readings of textual works such as poems, comic books, protest posters, illustrations, photographs, and monuments, arguing for the existence of an intersection between poetics, protest, and propaganda. Theorizing this conceptual term as socioloquy, I elaborate on the modalities and effects of my chosen case studies, explaining the traditional modal stages of socioloquies—the presentational, sensational, ideational, and activational—with special reference to J. L. Austin’s theory of speech acts and Jacques Ellul’s contributions to propaganda theory. I emphasize that these works of various media and genres share common traits that unite them in terms of the moral message that they propagate as part of an ideology, as well as the subtle similarities between the methods they respectively employ to articulate the sociopolitical stance that each work embodies and impresses upon its audience, such that they operate as perlocutionary speech acts which, as performatives, are received and interpreted by those who experience them. These socioloquies serve to inform any general reading of the Vietnam War’s cultural landscape as a historic moment dominated by a multitude of art forms and mass media, such as journalism, radio, and television. By analyzing each of these works and considering them together, this dissertation elucidates the nature of the war’s effect on the US populace via protest and propaganda, which I argue are intimately connected to one another by way of poetics. Lastly, I argue that this socioloquy paradigm extends beyond the Vietnam War—and even to times of peace—and that it can enrich our understanding of our current era because of its potency as a concept that is pervasively applicable; embedded in this project is the suggestive gesture towards acting on this understanding upon acknowledging it so that the world can become more aware of the machinations that allow different kinds of propaganda to operate on an impressionable audience. In spite of the terrors of the modern world, this project remains hopeful that works of art and literature can shed light on the darkness occupying our own cultural landscape.