Taking Liberties with the Past: Monuments, Memorials, and Memory

This article takes up the question of how material objects convey meanings across time by examining James’s responses to several Civil War monuments and memorials in The American Scene. Drawing on Edward S. Casey’s analysis of commemoration as a set of practices of public remembering and Paul Ricoeur’s schema of the cycle of mimesis—prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration—as frames within which to understand both the experience of encounters with objects having historical value and the rendering of that experience in writing, Haviland shows how the meanings of those objects travel across time via transformative individual and collective engagements.