Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade [Paperback]

Robert S. Nelson (Editor), Margaret Olin (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0226571580 | ISBN-13: 978-0226571584 | Edition: 1

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."

Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors:
Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman, Wu Hung

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Nelson and Olin have collected an extraordinarily eclectic range of papers—on everything from early modern travel journals to the markers of nuclear waste sites, from nationalist conflicts in India to Roland Barthes and the temporality of photography.”—Charles Barbour, Canadian Literature

(Charles Barbour Canadian Literature )

“Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is a provocative collection of essays that explore the social meaning and cultural function of images. As many of the authors testify, monuments do not reflect their past so much as they work to create memory in the present. Particularly valuable and timely is Nelson’s and Olin’s inclusion of studies that analyze the significance of monuments, sometimes destroyed, in different cultures."

(Michael Ann Holly, author of The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects )

“Nelson and Olin have brought together a rich group of essays of exceedingly high quality. There are many books on monuments and memory, but no other book probes the notion of the monument in the exhaustive way this book does. None has a comparable chronological, global, and imaginative range, or its intellectual and methodological diversity.”

(Michele H. Bogart, author of Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York ) --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."

Examining how monuments preserve memory, these essays demonstrate how phenomena as diverse as ancient drum towers in China and ritual whale-killings in the Pacific Northwest serve to represent and negotiate time. Connecting that history to the present with an epilogue on the World Trade Center, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade is pertinent not only for art historians but for anyone interested in the turbulent history of monuments—a history that is still very much with us today.

Contributors:
Stephen Bann, Jonathan Bordo, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jas Elsner, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Robert S. Nelson, Margaret Olin, Ruth B. Phillips, Mitchell Schwarzer, Lillian Lan-ying Tseng, Richard Wittman, Wu Hung

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 353 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (January 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226571580
• ISBN-13: 978-0226571584
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #789,739 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)