Memorial Mania

This prodigiously researched, generously illustrated book will interest those involved in commemoration studies or the “cultural politics of emotion.” Erika Doss considers memorials “archives of public affect” and “repositories of feelings and emotions” (p. 13). Concentrating largely on U.S. examples, she sees much of today's memorial making as “excessive, frenzied, and extreme—hence manic” (ibid.). This “mania” is especially shaped by “the fevered pitch of public feelings such as grief, gratitude, fear, shame, and anger” (p. 2). Those emotions provide the main titles for the five chapters following the introduction—although sometimes the inclusion of a particular memorial under one or another of these headings seems arbitrary. The work, though compendious in places, is strongest when it sustains attention on a single memorial for extended passages and explores debates such as disagreements about the design. For example, although many greeted the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., as an expression of gratitude to the “greatest generation,” others objected to its “fascist” style; bloggers responding to plans to commemorate the September 11, 2001, attacks at the crash site of United Flight 93 in Pennsylvania expressed a preference for huge bronze statues and flags rather than “remembrance ponds” and “hope and healing centers” (p. 178

Aesthetics · Anger · Archaeology · Art · Feeling · Gratitude · Grief · Mania · Media studies · Mood · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Shame · Sociology · Style (visual arts · History · Psychology · Social Psychology · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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