Archived seminar
03 December 2014: Subjectivities in the Aftermath: the “generation between” in Britain, 1920-45 (CISC Seminar Series)
Professor Mike Roper from Department of Sociology, University of Essex
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
Children growing up in Britain during the 1920s and 30s were surrounded by the mental and physical legacies of the First World War, yet it was a conflict of which they had no direct experience. This paper - based on ongoing interviews with the children of First World War veterans, and now in their 80s and 90s - reflects on the experience of coming after, and what it meant psychologically to this generation. How the war was present in the family lives of children born in the aftermath, what did parents and relatives communicate to children about the conflict, and what did the children internalise? In the paper I will focus on the interviews and some of the methodological issues I am facing. People have been very willing to participate in the project, but they often remark that their fathers did not talk about the war and they did not ask questions. They are also elderly and recall their childhoods in the interwar years from a very different present. I will ask: what kinds of approaches are available to the interviewer, talking to very elderly people people about events that predate their birth, to begin to construct a psychological history of the First World War across generations?Biographical note:
Professor Michael Roper is a social and cultural historian of twentieth century Britain whose research spans the fields of memory and war, masculinities, and psychoanalysis. His book The Secret Battle. Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009), investigates the emotional experience of the First World War through letters between soldiers and their families. He is co-editor (with Timothy Ashplant and Graham Dawson) of The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (2000) and has published numerous articles on methodology, the history of subjectivity and the uses of psychoanalysis in historical research. He is currently working on a history of ‘the generation between’ in Britain, which explores the psychological impact of the First World War on children born between the wars.
This event is open to the general public.