Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America by Erika Doss (review)

In Memorial Mania, an encompassing survey of modern memorializing in the United States, Erika Doss wonders why contemporary Americans create memorials, and why so many of them. Doss contends that the spur toward the modern proliferation of memorials can be explained by “memorial mania,” an obsession with memory and history that promotes an urgent need to claim these issues in visible, public ways.

For Doss, what distinguishes modern memorial making from past impulses toward memorializing is the elevated place of emotion in contemporary American society: memorials become “archives of public affect . . . repositories of feeling and emotion” (13). The structure of the book is therefore governed by different affective themes; chapters focus on grief, which centers on memorials to the Columbine tragedy and other temporary memorials, including roadside shrines and teddy bear piles; fear, looking at the proliferation of terrorism memorials, both before and after 9/11; and gratitude, which centers on the hulking and graceless World War II memorial on the Mall in Washingon D.C. The last two chapters examine newer types of memorials that are inspired by the affective states of shame and anger. Lynching memorials occupy the bulk of her analysis of shame, while the chapter on anger focuses on memorials that express contestations of American identity, particularly in the case of Native American historical revisionism.

For Doss, the current desire to create memorials in the United States is motivated by continuing struggles over identity and political representation in an increasingly divided nation. She sees a shift from past memorials that embodied unified narratives of a celebratory, masculine national history to a more fragmented memorial landscape that commemorates individual memories or personal grievances, tragedy and trauma, and the social and political agendas of interest groups made up of “rights bearing citizens.” As Doss portrays it, the frenzy to memorialize is driven by anxiety over the division and claiming of rights in an increasingly individualized public sphere. Public art becomes an arena of struggle over cultural, social, and economic authority. The argument that memorials and monuments express contests over authority is not new, but Doss calls upon an impressive range of sources to assemble an exhaustive catalog of modern memorials. She provides detailed and sometimes eye-opening descriptions of both the cultural and political processes that bring memorials into existence, and supplements this discussion with ample photographic illustration. In interpreting the meaning of memorials, Doss draws from a wide array of theoretical models, most notably models that consider emotion and public feeling.

While the consideration of emotion raises intriguing paths for inquiry, Doss is at her most successful in showcasing the political and cultural influences that shape modern memorial making. The “key tropes of modern cultural consciousness” that she identifies in modern memorials—irony, contradiction and conflict, victims as heroes—also dominate mass media and entertainment culture; in this sense, modern memorials are inextricable from the media narratives that breed them. Such impulses are most evident in her discussion of memorials at Columbine and the World Trade Center. Furthermore, by stressing the centrality of “rights” speech and demands for respect that are often articulated in the memorial process, Doss calls attention to the increasing importance of the individual and of individual rights in contemporary rhetoric about the body politic—a far cry from the assumptions of unified national purpose that motivated memorials in the nineteenth century.

Doss’s comprehensive narrative of the evolution of memorial and monument making helps situate her current examples in a historical context. The analysis of the post-World War II frustration with figurative monuments is particularly fascinating; post-war feelings about the futility of the image in the wake of unimaginable catastrophe help explain the hiatus in formal memorial building that occurred in the 1950’s, when the great majority of war memorials were “living” memorials: parks, highways, stadiums. In the end, however, Doss’s thoroughness in tracing the genesis of the trends she reviews has the tendency to undercut her contentions about the unique nature of modern memorializing. Instead, the...