Title: Mimetic Strategies of Media Discourse and Resistance Writing in The Sympathizer

Abstract: The Sympathizer written by the Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen breaks away from the singular perspective of the American narrative of the Vietnam War, deconstructing the memory of the war as scripted by American ideology with a focus on Vietnam. The references to various media within the novel reveal how the United States employs mimetic strategies of media discourse to manipulate reality. This paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the novel’s emotional sequences in musical discourse, the narrative structure and visual representation in filmic discourse, and irony that serves as an underlying narrative in journalistic discourse. Through these analyses, this paper seeks to explore how Viet Thanh Nguyen resists and subverts the mimetic nature of American media discourse. This is not only a call for readers to question the proclaimed authenticity of media discourse but also a challenge to the Western-centric view of history, offering a counter-narrative that questions and rewrites it.

Keywords: The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, media discourse, mimicry, resistance writing

Authors: Jiayi Kang, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China; Zhongming Bao, Professor, School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.03.013