Henry James @ Ground Zero: Remembering the Future

What makes a memorial to a national catastrophe succeed for present and future generations? For Henry James, looking at two memorials to Civil War heroes--Saint-Gaudens's statue of General Sherman and General/President Grant's Tomb--it was the "clean, clear meaning" of the latter that made it the ground of a powerful commemorative experience that would continue to have meaning for U. S. citizens. Drawing on the theories of phenomenologist Edward S. Casey on remembering and commemoration, Beverly Haviland analyzes James's response to these two memorials to provide a way to think about the work of memorialization in process at Ground Zero.