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
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... future for the civilization that produced them. The violence of the Great War served as the instrument of fate, the destroyer of individuals and societies. The simple victim found his archetype in Paul Baümer, the protagonist in what ...
... easily disentangled.27 “Experience” is never a matter exclusively of recording a “now.” Intrinsically, experience looks both forward and back. “Having had an experience” can only occur in anticipation of a future in which the.
... future in which the past experience will have some kind of significance. In terms of simple cognition, experience can achieve some sort of coherence only through recollection. But Janet Watson's rather severe distinction between ...
... future. As Hayden White put it, “the narrative represents the aspects of time in which endings can be seen as linked to beginnings to form a continuity within a difference.”42 In forming this continuity, the person who tries to fix ...
... future, we are incapable of apprehending the significance of the thronging impressions, and know not what value to attach to the judgments we form.1 Time had gone out of joint, or at least narrative time, which could connect in a linear ...
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 |