Feeling Memory

Reviews / Votes

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 <i>The Text and the Voice: Writing, Speaking, Democracy, and American Literature</i> 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 <i>Stealing Home: Looting, Restitution, and Reconstructing Jewish Lives in France, 1942-1947</i> 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 <i>Ordinary Affects</i> 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 <i>Afterlives of War: A Descendants' History</i> 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 <i>Empire's Children: Child Emigration, Welfare, and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967</i> The book sheds important methodological light on the uses and misuses of oral history. It will be of interest to anyone working with oral sources, not just specialists in childhood at war. Dodd's critical discussion of the reuse of interviews conducted by other scholars is a strong feature of the book. * American Historical Review * Highly original and methodologically innovative...It's a beautiful, important, and exciting book whose empirical findings are difficult to summarize but that convincingly makes the case that historians need to understand and pay much more attention to the affective realm. * Journal of Modern History * Feeling Memory is a must-read for scholars interested in memory, affect, and emotions. The book also provides valuable methodological insights for those working with oral interviews, as well as historians of childhood questioning adult interviews' potential for recovering children's perspectives....Its short, stand-alone, and example-filled chapters will make wonderful additions to undergraduate course syllabi. * H-War *