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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... Rites of Passage and the Initiation to Combat 2 The Mastery of Survival: Death, Mutilation, and Killing 3 The Genre of Consent 4 The Novel and the Search for Closure Conclusion Bibliography Preface Unexpected things can influence an ...
... rite of passage. Yet rites of passage, by definition, have determined outcomes. Initiates know in advance what they will become through their initiation. Not so for the combatant, given the physical and existential perils of this new ...
... passage from one world to another. At the heart of his anxiety lay profound uncertainty about that next world and the rules, if any, according. Rites of Passage and the Initiation to Combat. Rites of Passage and the Initiation to Combat.
... rites to structure specific pivotal personal and collective experiences. A rite imposes a kind of performed narrative on a major transition. “We undergo passages,” wrote Ronald L. Grimes, “but we enact rites.”2 René Girard observed that ...
... rites of passage, by definition, must have closure. Postliminal rites occur for just this reason, to certify the new identities of the initiates and to reincorporate them into the societies whence they came. Soldiers in 1914 who ...
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 |