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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... simply contribute to debates on questions of testimony, and can encourage research that will modify the conclusions here. This is not a long book, but it took a long time to write. In bringing it to completion, I incurred many debts ...
... simply to alleviate the boredom of the sector and in part to perform Legionnaire bravado, Van Lees organized any number of drunken debauches in his small corner of No Man's Land. But in the text, Cendrars abruptly shifted chronology and ...
... simply stops with the death of the German enemy. There is no conclusion apart from the brutal, straightforward moral of “kill or be killed,” with which the author seems content. The death of Van Lees concludes more ambiguously than it ...
... Simply put, narratives and narrators create each other. Firsthand testimonies share a common goal of constructing “the embattled self,” an identity as well as a text. At the heart of that identity lay the experience of the war of the ...
... simply consume All Quiet on the Western Front. The exceptionally curious could add as much Jünger as they could tolerate, preferably followed by a few pages of Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf. Both simple victim and brute are stable, indeed ...
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 |