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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... and nonfiction. Readers of Tim O'Brien or Kurt Vonnegut might find themselves on familiar ground. Cendrars slipped in and out of seemingly self-contradictory roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. He became a perpetrator.
... witness. He became a perpetrator in one of his early postwar publications, J'ai tué (I Have Killed), one of the very few descriptions of killing an enemy soldier in hand-to-hand combat.3 J'ai tué is a short book (twenty-one small ...
... witness reported, the quiet ones led, followed by some hysterics, who managed somehow to encourage the others. As the French organized the conquered trench, Cendrars reflected on the debris that came from all over the world to create ...
... witness to and victim of violence. But he seemed never to resent the war that had mutilated him and nearly destroyed his adopted country. Like many well-known writers of the Great War, Cendrars traveled the world after 1918 and wrote ...
... witness on a battlefield.” trousers fall to the ground empty while the frightful scream. as we were moving up to the assault, he was blown up by a shell and I saw, with my own eyes, I saw, this handsome legionary sucked up into the air ...
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 |