I have the good fortune to announce I will be speaking to a literature seminar at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on February 21, 2012. The course is titled Literature and Medicine and will be taught by Dr. Marshall Alcorn, professor of English and director of undergraduate studies. I will be talking about my novel, The Second Tour, which has been assigned to the class and will be compared to Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.
My background is in English literature and I have read these other works, which I place in high esteem. I read The Heart of Darkness for a lit class my freshman year in 1970, got an A on my paper and was called into the professor’s office to discuss it. He was impressed with the paper because no one before me had compared The Heart of Darkness to one’s war experience. In 1979, Apocalypse Now was released, a Vietnam War film that uses The Heart of Darkness as its metaphorical backdrop.
The Things They Carried is the Vietnam War novel against which all Vietnam War novels are measured. It will be interesting to see how The Second Tour stacks up.
So, this is an absolute honor and tremendous opportunity for me personally, although I have to admit up front it scares the absolute pants off me to place my life in the hands of pilots and their mechanical devices.