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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... the Great War Leonard V. Smith. The Embattled Self LEONARD V. SMITH Cornell University Press Ithaca and London To Ann Sherif Contents Preface Introduction: Experience, Narrative, and Narrator. French Soldiers' Testimony of the Great War.
... testimony is testimony to something, but that something is often not an empirically verifiable reality. Rather, these texts are about a struggle for coherence. They seek to create a narrative of experience and a narrator capable of ...
... testimony more generally. Scholars familiar with the subject are likely to find inclusions and exclusions of which they will disapprove. I have tried to provide ways of thinking about these texts as a body of documentary evidence. I ...
... testimony remained the most important means through which experience in the trenches entered the public sphere. Testimony took many forms, such as diaries, letters, reflections written during the war or thereafter, short stories, and ...
... testimony of the Great War, Erich Marie Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1928). Seduced by his teacher into joining the army at nineteen years of age, Paul saw his very soul destroyed by the violence of the war. His comrades ...
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 |