The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials ─ Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials

Recent decades have witnessed what appears to be a substantial increase in the numbers of new public memorials built in Europe and the United States. In The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials, Erika Doss considers this contemporary explosion of public commemoration in terms of changed cultural and social practices regarding mourning, memory, and public feeling. Memorials, she argues, are the physical and visual embodiment of public affect, whose meaning calls for an emotional epistemology attuned to their historical contexts, social meanings, and affective conditions. Focusing especially on temporary memorials, those ephemeral memorials made of flowers, candles, balloons, hand-penned cards, and stuffed animals that precipitate at the sites of tragic and traumatic death, this essay especially considers how grief is mediated in contemporary commemorative cultures.

Erika Doss is professor and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA.