Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero.

Glassberg, David

doi:10.2307/2078607

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“…Since World War II, apart from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the most ambiguous conflicted war memorial is the Iwo Jima Memorial, which diverged from the tradition of using neoclassical design. Marling and Wetenhall (2013) account for President Eisenhower's controversial support for the Iwo Jima Memorial by pointing out how even while Eisenhower knew that the soldiers depicted in the memorial deserved no more recognition than those who died trying to get up its slopes-its realistic, rather than symbolic, imbalance-he found value in what Marling and Wetenhall (2013: 16-17) dub a people's statue, lacking the usual complexities of high art. There were no grieving maidens in togas here, no allegories, no odd shapes to puzzle over, no enigmatic beings doing who-knows-what.…”

Section: Ambiguous Physical Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context

Shank

2022

Journal of Material Culture

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Memorials and monuments often shape the narratives of public memory surrounding key events and figures, even as they help process and represent the trauma and remembered emotions that those subjects evoke. This essay develops a schema of four types of memorial ambiguity in order to provide more precise analytic tools for understanding memorials. Ambiguous physical representation, ambiguous messages, ambiguous emotions, and ambiguous political responses interrelate as parts of the rhetorical interpretation of memorials. Examples draw from national memorials such as the Iwo Jima Memorial in Washington, DC, and the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawai’i as well as regional examples like Oklahoma’s Yellow Ribbon Memorial commemorating a 1986 postal mass shooting and The Guardian atop Oklahoma’s state capitol. This typology matters to memorial scholars and memorial designers alike: those who seek to theorize memorials ought to have a more developed sense of the rhetorical nature of ambiguity, and those who seek to construct memorials ought to consider the possibly ambiguous effects of their design. Failure to understand memorial ambiguity can lead to forgotten or ineffective memorials.

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Section: Ambiguous Physical Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context

Shank

2022

Journal of Material Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero.

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context

Memorial ambiguity: A typology of rhetorical effects in Oklahoma and the wider US context

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