Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America

Front Cover
University of Chicago Press, Jul 30, 2010 - Art - 458 pages

In the past few decades, thousands of new memorials to executed witches, victims of terrorism, and dead astronauts, along with those that pay tribute to civil rights, organ donors, and the end of Communism have dotted the American landscape. Equally ubiquitous, though until now less the subject of serious inquiry, are temporary memorials: spontaneous offerings of flowers and candles that materialize at sites of tragic and traumatic death. In Memorial Mania, Erika Doss argues that these memorials underscore our obsession with issues of memory and history, and the urgent desire to express—and claim—those issues in visibly public contexts.

Doss shows how this desire to memorialize the past disposes itself to individual anniversaries and personal grievances, to stories of tragedy and trauma, and to the social and political agendas of diverse numbers of Americans. By offering a framework for understanding these sites, Doss engages the larger issues behind our culture of commemoration. Driven by heated struggles over identity and the politics of representation, Memorial Mania is a testament to the fevered pitch of public feelings in America today.

 

Contents

Introduction
1
Scope of the Subject
17
Temporary Memorials and Contemporary Modes of Mourning
61
Terrorism Memorials and Security Narratives
117
Memorializing World War II and the Greatest Generation
187
Duluths Lynching Memorial and Issues of National Morality
253
Contesting American Identity in Contemporary Memorial Culture
313
Notes
377
Index
437
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
Erika Doss
Limited preview - 2012
Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
Erika Doss
No preview available - 2012

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2010)

Erika Doss is an art historian whose books include Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism; Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy; Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America; and American Art of the 20th-21st Centuries. Doss is Distinguished Chair in the Edith O'Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas, Dallas.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Memorial Mania
TitleMemorial Mania: Public Feeling in America
AuthorErika Doss
Editionillustrated, reprint
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN0226159388, 9780226159386
Length458 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Art / General
History / General
History / United States / General
  
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