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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... produced their own truth that transcended empirical evidence—of the soldier as victim. Historians could thus feel comfortable with, or even ignore, the confused boundary between fiction and nonfiction in soldiers' testimonies. No one ...
... produced by modernity in the nineteenth century. One had his volition itself more or less removed by experience in the trenches. The other had his will perverted, so that he came to desire and identify with the violence that shaped him ...
... produced the even more horrible war that began in 1939. Paradoxically, the duo of victim and brute seemed to close down rather than invite further investigation by historians. For given the selfevidently traumatic history of Europe in ...
... produced identities (and the reverse) through essentially the same means before the armistice and after. This book explores means of transition between “what happened” on the battlefield and “experience” as rendered in published texts ...
... the writer was a nine-year-old child, bright beyond his years perhaps, but a child nonetheless. The young Sartre understood this virtually from the moment he finished the text. This revelation embarrassed him and produced 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 |