2007: "Witnessing the War through Conversational Testimonies. Representational Dilemmas and Discursive Survival in First World War Testimonial Literature", The International Journal of the Humanities 4(10): 21-26. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Writing Against and Despite Silence: A Literary Analysis of Testimonies of the Post-War Years
Fourth Future of Holocaust Testimonies Conference, 2016
Written at a time when no one wanted to listen, the testimonies of the Nazi camp survivors published in the immediate post-war period contain within them signs of their feeling of being compelled to break the silence and speak of their experience – even, if no one ever reads them, to an imaginary reader. The importance of imagination and fiction, present at the time of imprisonment, seemed to remain of significance not only to the healing process, but also to have been intrinsically linked to the writing process. Indeed, even though the authors often state in their foreword that they do not aim at a literary effect, the factual narration of those testimonies contains some stylistic devices (comparisons, metaphors) and narrative techniques (intertextuality) that fall within the scope of literary imagination – an imagination that could, perhaps, help a potential reader better understand the inconceivable experience of the camps. This paper focusing on testimonies written in French and Italian will use a literary approach, while keeping in mind the particular post-war contexts in France and Italy. Emphasis will be put on testimonies written by survivors who were not listened to at the time of writing because they – Jewish people and women – were not part of a war testimonial tradition that the general population could relate to and understand. Many of their testimonies have now been forgotten or have rarely been read at all up to this day. This paper will emphasize the need for contemporary readers to listen to the people who were ignored at the time they were writing about their experience by taking on the role of the imaginary reader for whom they wrote.
Authoring War Memories: War Memoir Writing and Testimonial Theatre Performances
Analyses/Rereadings/Theories: A Journal Devoted to Literature, Film and Theatre
This paper will discuss aspects concerning authorship, memory, and war representation, as well as trauma and healing. In order to do so, I will explore the writing of war memoirs and/or the re-enactment of war experiences on the stage as two ways of expressing and coping with war trauma. In both cases, the concept of the author, a war veteran as first-person narrator or self-performer, is central to the representation of the traumatic memories of war. It is precisely through this interaction between the author, as a legitimate witness, and source of authentic and reliable information, that the readership/audience connects emotionally with the experience of the combatants and can empathise with their situation. A theoretical conceptualisation of war memoir writing, and testimonial theatre will be illustrated with specific examples of texts connected with the Falklands War (UK-Argentina, 1982). The dominant perspective of the reflection are veterans’ stories.
Drawing on some of the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets, this article focuses on the ghost not only as the clearest expression of the myth of the Great War but also as a counter-model undermining traditionally heroic patterns and unmasking certain narratives and identities that had been mar-ginalized, excluded, or repressed. By assessing the ghost as a shadow of the hero, the ghost as a vehicle between life and death and the ghost as haunting memory, it will be possible to contextualize and explore the meanings and experiences of the hero in relation to the antihero, cross over the boundaries between the two and enable a more complex analysis of the real Great War soldier. The article will also study how the memory of war and of war heroisms is rethought and worked over by the veteran as witness and what writing as remembering might entail in terms of the expression of the self in relation to the dominant war myths. Bearing in mind that memory speaks through the texts, sometimes against the writer's will, particular attention will be given to how the reworking of the past shaped heroic masculine identity and to what extent the veteran's identity was determined by what of the war experience he incorporated into the text.
Narratives of War. Remembering and Chronicling Battle in Twentieth-Century Europe. Routledge, 2019
‘Twentieth-Century Narratives of War. Conclusions’. PP 207-220, 2019
Narratives of War considers the way war and battle are remembered and narrated across space and time in Europe in the twentieth century. eds. Nanci Adler, Remco Ensel, Michael Wintle The book reflects on how narratives are generated and deployed, and on their function as coping mechanisms, means of survival, commemorative gestures, historical records and evidence. The contributions address such issues as the tension and discrepancy between memory and the official chronicling of war, the relationship between various individuals’ versions of war narratives and the ways in which events are brought together to serve varied functions for the narrators and their audiences. Drawing upon the two World Wars, the Spanish Civil War and the ex-Yugoslav wars, and considering narrative genres that include film, schoolbooks, novels, oral history, archives, official documents, personal testimony and memoirs, readers are introduced to a range of narrative forms and examples that highlight the complexity of narrative in relation to war. Approached from a multidisciplinary perspective, and taken together, analysis of these narratives contributes to our understanding of the causes, experience, dynamics and consequences of war, making it the ideal book for those interested in twentieth-century war history and the history of memory and narrative.
Modernist Studies Association, 2019
1914-1945 -- the period Siegfried Sassoon called “a cemetery for the civilized delusions of the nineteenth century” -- saw millions of Britons fighting in two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, and marked a significant evolution in views about testimonial authority in wartime (Weald 274). Of prime importance is the changing status of frontline testimony exemplified by soldier-poets’ narratives of the Great War. In their commemorative writings, Sassoon and his peers argued for a radical shift away from the authority traditionally accompanying Government, Army, and journalistic accounts of war, and towards the direct experience of frontline combatants. While the protest-poet’s war-narrative and its discounting of homefront experience held a unique authority in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, recent scholarship has demonstrated that this authority was challenged in Britain’s succeeding wars. This panel proposes reading Britain’s evolving relationship to war and testimonial authority through three key writers who each survived multiple unique engagements with twentieth-century warfare. Less well-known than his poetry and memoirs, Sassoon’s autobiographies were composed from the uncomfortable position of “armchair-combatant” during the Second World War. Forced into the helpless position of those he had long rallied against, Sassoon-as-civilian reluctantly reoriented his approach to narrative authority by retroactively incorporating non-combatants’ experiences of war and suffering into his own autobiographical testimony. Another evolving perspective on narrative authority is that of Basil Bunting, who was imprisoned for refusing to be conscripted in 1918. His poem about this traumatic episode, “Villon,” is as physically personal as the protest-poets’ works. Bunting imbues his work with Eliotic references to the deep European past. Reflecting on Bunting’s position as conscientious objector, “Villon” interweaves that deep past in a way that combatant-poetry generally eschews. Despite his experience in WWI, however, Bunting later served as an intelligence officer in Persia during WWII. In “The Spoils”, and the autobiographic “Briggflatts”, Bunting refers to his time on the active side of military duty through allusions to Europe and Britain’s martial and epic-poetic past. Finally, George Orwell demonstrates an evolving position on frontline correctives to homefront propaganda in his writings on the Spanish Civil War. Homage to Catalonia emulates the soldier-poets’ “debunking” vision of war, suggesting an analogy between anti-fascist jingoism in 1937 Britain and homefront propaganda from 1914-1918. Orwell’s suspicion of atrocity propaganda leads him to modify his frontline testimony, effacing references to pain and suffering, and downplaying the dangers represented by bombing planes. In 1942, however, Orwell revisits this manipulation of testimonial authority with shame, recognizing that his (and others’) practice of lingering on the problematic effects of homefront propaganda had contributed to a culture of appeasement. Orwell’s mature perspective on atrocity propaganda illuminates key factors in the evolving relationship between frontline testimony and homefront culture between the wars. Thus, each of these writers used his own experience of Britain’s later conflicts to reconsider the testimonial authority staked by the soldier-poets of 1914-18. They advocate against any monumental war-myth, calling for a reconstruction of testimonial writing that relies upon polyphonic sources, including, but not limited to, frontline combatants.
My paper focuses on the input of the performative side of Vietnam War memory in Tim O'Brien's How to Tell a True War Story. I contend that the performance of war memory might represent an essential part of human life trying to work through traumas and of the literary creative process. More precisely, I address the following core questions raised by O'Brien's story: in point of literary creative writing, how can a writer use war memories not as just tools of recollection but of re-actualization? How can one achieve the suspense of detachment,
This book explores the representation of intra-state conflicts. It offers a distinctive approach by looking at narrative forms and strategies associated with civil war testimony, historiography and memory. The volume seeks to reflect current research in civil war in a number of disciplines and covers a range of geographical areas, from the advent of modern forms of testimonies, history writing and public remembering in the early modern period, to the present day. In focusing on narrative, broadly defined, the contributors not only explore civil war testimonies, historiography and memory as separate fields of inquiry, but also highlight the interplay between these areas, which are shown to share porous boundaries. Chapters look at the ways in which various narrative forms feed off each other, be they oral, written or visual narratives, personal or collective accounts, or testimonies from victims or perpetrators.
institucional.us.es, 2010
A major theme common to war fi ction is the truthful representation of a traumatic episode. This paper examines Tim O'Brien's use of experimental techniques in "How to Tell a True War Story" to highlight the troublesome postmodern connection between fi ction and truth, and their close interrelation with some signifi cant motifs; namely, the nature of storytelling, the rejection of generalizations about the war, and the deconstruction of the concept of truth. Contemporary issues in trauma theory draw on the pathological crisis of truth experienced by survivors, which lead them to both a denial of the experience and an urge to reconstruct it and fi ll in the gaps of their memory. In O'Brien's short story the narrator's compulsive behaviour to tell repeatedly the same traumatic event in different versions is understood as manifestation of his post-traumatic stress syndrome. The therapeutic working-through process he tries to undergo by means of his narrative is undertaken but never successfully accomplished because neither war nor postmodernist aesthetics allow for defi nite answers or absolute defi nitions of war.