The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great WarHow did the soldiers in the trenches of the Great War understand and explain battlefield experience, and themselves through that experience? Situated at the intersection of military history and cultural history, The Embattled Self draws on the testimony of French combatants to explore how combatants came to terms with the war. In order to do so, they used a variety of narrative tools at hand—rites of passage, mastery, a character of the soldier as a consenting citizen of the Republic. None of the resulting versions of the story provided a completely consistent narrative, and all raised more questions about the "truth" of experience than they answered. Eventually, a story revolving around tragedy and the soldier as victim came to dominate—even to silence—other types of accounts. In thematic chapters, Leonard V. Smith explains why the novel structured by a specific notion of trauma prevailed by the 1930s. Smith canvasses the vast literature of nonfictional and fictional testimony from French soldiers to understand how and why the "embattled self" changed over time. In the process, he undermines the conventional understanding of the war as tragedy and its soldiers as victims, a view that has dominated both scholarly and popular opinion since the interwar period. The book is important reading not only for traditional historians of warfare but also for scholars in a variety of fields who think critically about trauma and the use of personal testimony in literary and historical studies. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 26
... Norton Cru, himself a French veteran of the war of 1914–18. In a study of some three hundred testimonies of the Great War published in French, Norton Cru had showed in considerable detail how literary staples taken as “true,” such as ...
... Norton Cru believed it could be determined with certainty in most any situation what did and did not happen in the trenches. But the more testimonies I read, the more convinced I became that this in fact was not the case—certainly not ...
... Norton Cru did. But in many cases, the texts he praised most highly are still by far the most sophisticated and revealing, even (and perhaps most especially) if read differently. I have made no effort to have the last word on French ...
... Norton Cru proved many years ago the physical impossibility of “mountains of corpses” and “rivers of blood.”15 But within a metanarrative of tragedy, testimonies in all genres produced their own truth that transcended empirical evidence ...
... Norton Cru's term témoignage (testimony) still seems best to describe the documentary base for this book. The author of a témoignage is a témoin or “witness.”29 Témoignage has both empirical and moral components. The témoin reports ...
Other editions - View all
The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War Leonard V. Smith Limited preview - 2014 |
The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War Leonard V. Smith Limited preview - 2007 |
The Embattled Self: French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War Leonard V. Smith No preview available - 2014 |