Feeling Memory - (Columbia Oral History) by Lindsey Dodd (Paperback)

About the Book

What 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.

Book Synopsis

What 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.

Lindsey Dodd draws on the recorded oral narratives of a hundred people to examine the variety of experiences children had during the war. She considers different aspects of remembering, underscoring the centrality of emotion to memory. This book covers a wide range of locations--the country and the city, Occupied France and the Free Zone--and situations--well-off and poor children, those separated from their families and those with them; it places Jewish children's experiences alongside non-Jewish children's. Against the backdrop of momentous events, readers encounter children playing, working, eating, thinking, doing, and feeling.

An investigation of the emotions of history, Feeling Memory argues for the transformative potential of affect theory and affective methodologies in oral history and the history of everyday life. This book makes major contributions to the history of France during World War II, understandings of children's lives in war, and the use of memory in historical and oral history analysis.

Review Quotes

Feeling 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, 1942-1947

Feeling 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, 1869-1967

Feeling 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 Affects

A 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 Literature

In 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' History

About the Author

Lindsey Dodd is an independent historian and oral historian. Until 2023 she was reader in modern European history at the University of Huddersfield. She is the author of French Children Under the Allied Bombs, 1940-1945: An Oral History (2016) and coeditor of Vichy France and Everyday Life: Confronting the Challenges of Wartime (2018). She is also part of the editorial team for the journal Oral History.