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 30
... twisted ethos of the war itself. As Jünger wrote in War as an Inner Experience (1922), “The war, father of all things, is also our father. It has hammered, cast and 17 tempered us into what we are.” Fighting as described.
... Fighting as described by Jünger became a highly sexualized encounter with physicality and domination. In Fire and Blood (1925) he wrote: But now we will rip away this veil instead of gingerly lifting its corner. We approach as ...
... Yet no experience seemed more volatile and fragile, or more fraught with ideological significance, than the experience of fighting the Great War. No identity seemed more problematic than that of the combatant. Anxiety as to.
... Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4–5. 29. I explore témoignage and the témoin as concepts in “Jean Norton Cru, lecteur des livres de guerre ...
... fighting it. The chaos of warfare created precisely the situation Freud described—fragmented information, alongside immense physical and emotional peril. I have previously noted that experience “as it happens,” in the sense of a ...
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 |