iLearnforum

Area: SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURE

Module Title: Selected Short Fiction by Hồ Anh Thái: The Goat Meat Special and Other Stories

Instructor Name : Thaveeporn Vasavakul

Contact Hours : 15 hours

Language of Instruction : English and Languages of Southeast Asia

Schedule : 17 Aug 2026 - 28 Sep 2026

Details :

Selected Short Fiction by Hồ Anh Thái: The Goat Meat Special and Other Stories is part of ilearnforum’s Southeast Asian Languages and Literature Series. This six-week online module focuses on selected stories from the bilingual collection The Goat Meat Special and Other Stories. Students read these works in relation to Vietnam’s postwar, post-central-planning period, commonly known as the đổi mới era, a period that reshaped Vietnamese society, culture, and everyday life. The module examines how this period encouraged new reflection on wartime experience, reunification, and social transition, while also bringing the emergence of new wealth, a widening urban-rural divide, renewed cultural and spiritual practices, and the coming of age of a generation raised in peacetime. The module introduces Hồ Anh Thái’s short fiction through major themes in postwar Vietnamese literature, including war memory, postwar social change, socialism, bureaucracy, youth culture, gender, market society, satire, surrealism, exile, and storytelling. It presents Hồ Anh Thái as a writer whose comic and often absurd fiction examines postwar disillusionment, moral ambiguity, corruption, gendered vulnerability, and historical injury. The module moves from historical context and social critique to gender, literary form, and the writer’s role. Students consider how stories about war, bureaucracy, youth, women, money, Western prestige, and storytelling reveal the contradictions of postwar and đổi mới Vietnam. The central question is: How does Hồ Anh Thái use humor, surrealism, satire, and fragmented storytelling to reveal the hidden wounds and contradictions of postwar Vietnamese society? The module is especially well-suited to readers interested in contemporary Vietnamese writing and to those seeking a deeper understanding of Vietnam’s transformation through literature. Although it is not a language course, the module will also benefit advanced learners of Vietnamese. No prior knowledge of Vietnamese literature is required.

PDF File

Module Descrption-The Goat Meat Special and Other Stories.pdf

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