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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... turns a historical truism into a historical problem: we can understand the Great War of 1914–18 only as a tragedy ... turning to the original sources. Here, these comprise a vast and poorly understood body of historical documentation ...
... turning under a circular saw, so as to amputate in succession all of his arms, that one is Siva himself, the man made divine. It is appalling. Hence the smile.11 As with his description of the death of Van Lees, Cendrars meditated on ...
... turn shape history. As Jerrold Siegel's massive study indicates, few issues have so preoccupied Western intellectuals as the question of what constitutes individual identity.13 My focus here is much more narrow, in that I consider only ...
... turning to song as a metaphor in a survey of debates about experience that focused on why such debates have been so deeply felt.25 Dominick LaCapra, observing an “experiential turn” in historical writing, became interested in connecting ...
... , “Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 177–78. 1 In his first major statement on the Great War,
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 |