Description
Book SynopsisWhat did it feel like to be a child in France during World War II?
Feeling Memory is an affective exploration of children’s lives in wartime France and the ways they are remembered.
Trade ReviewA sensitive and imaginative exploration of the connections among war, childhood, and memory that demonstrates the meaning of emotions and feelings as historical forces. -- Alessandro Portelli, author of
The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, Democracy, and American LiteratureFeeling Memory deftly weaves together 'memory stories' and the latest scholarship to
provide an entirely fresh approach to World War II in France. The result is a richly textured, nuanced study of the emotions of history that offers us new ways to think about children’s experiences and the places and events that shape our memory of the past. -- Shannon L. Fogg, author of
Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947Feeling Memory theorizes a history of a present where events matter, memories stick and accrete, time ruptures, experiences generate, and little worlds proliferate around sounds, rhythms, and things. It experiments, listening for the intensities and unknown potential of an affective history from the inside out where the things of the world speak differently to one another. -- Kathleen C. Stewart, author of
Ordinary AffectsIn a compelling mixture of theory, reflections on method, and vivid vignettes,
Feeling Memory explores the emotions that animate and bind memory in oral history. Its insights extend well beyond the interview, however: Dodd shows what a history of emotions can achieve once affect is seen not just in terms of social prescriptions but as the glue that binds memory and relationships past and present. -- Michael Roper, author of
Afterlives of War: A Descendants' HistoryFeeling Memory provides a nuanced and sophisticated explication of how the emotional content of memory shapes the remembered past into the present. Dodd contends that all historians—not just oral historians—need to take affective forms of knowledge more seriously and to search for the traces of feelings in their sources and analyses. The memory stories that are at the heart of the book are truly engaging and often moving. They make the book come alive. -- Ellen R. Boucher, author of
Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Chronology
A Note on Transcription and Translation
Introduction
Pause—Anne-Marie and Her Father
Positioning
Part I. Memories Felt1. Articulated Feeling
Pause—Daniel: Fear on the Road
2. Affects and Intensities
Pause—Nicole: Inside Drancy
Part II. Memories LocatedPause—Nancette: Happy Places, Happy Times
3. The Weirdness of Memory Time
4. Places in Traumatic Memory
5. Spaces in Traumatic Memory
Pause—Hélène: Persecution and Space
Part III. Memories ToldPause—Filming Marie-Madeleine
6. Regimes of Memory, Regimes of Feeling
7. Communities of Memory, Communities of Feeling
Pause—Édith and Jean Compete
Part IV. Memories Lived8. Materialities of the Everyday
Pause—Henri Plays at War
9. Affective Others
Pause—Danièle: The Strain of Uncertainty
Pause—Robert: The Contingency of Moral Meaning
10. Contingency and Rupture
Conclusion: A Palette of Haecceities
Appendix: The Interviewees
Notes
Bibliography
