This dissertation examines the modes of individual and cultural grieving that characterize the British literature of the Great War and its aftermath, 1914-30. Combining archival research, cultural history, and genre theory, I identify the war literature’s expression of a poetics of grief and grievance: one that is melancholic, in that it resists redemptive mourning, and accusatory, in that it frequently assigns blame for war and suffering on civilian spectators or the writer himself. In order to trace the development of the anti-elegiac in the literature of the Great War, my dissertation provides: (a) a publication history of the war poems of Wilfred Owen, (b) a comparison of the manipulation of the pathetic fallacy and pastoral mode in the works of combatant poets and Virginia Woolf, and (c) a detailed assessment of the reception of the controversial war memoirs and novels of the late 1920s. My findings challenge the widely held assumption that the pervasive irony and disenchantment of the literature of the Great War is primarily a product of the historical rupture of the event. I emphasize that the ironic mode developed during the war- and inter-war periods is an expression of personal and social anxiety attached by writers to the subject of individual mortality. Additionally, I argue that the literature of the Great War focuses on the limits of language that addresses atrocity, and the instability of the idea of consolation in an era of mass, industrialized death. / text

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2008. / Also available via the World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-51).

Who was Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn? He was born in Rạch Giá, Việt Nam in 1938; served in the South Vietnamese army—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—during the Second Indochina War; and was publicly executed by the Communist forces on August 14, 1975, after refusing to surrender. Beyond that, it depends whom you ask. To the current Communist government of Việt Nam, whose historical narrative of national unity against foreign invasion denies the legitimacy of South Vietnam, he is a political traitor. To the American state, who conceptualizes the Vietnam War as a struggle between the U.S. and the Communists, he is a forgotten subject. To patriotic South Vietnamese veterans in the diaspora, who push back against these state imposed narratives of “organized forgetting,”[1] he is hero. To Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s family members, most of whom live in Việt Nam, he is a loved a one. To me, he is a grand-uncle. But I did not know of his fame—of his story—until I was twenty-one. Researching Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn, I grappled with the following questions: Who has the power to write history? How do stateless peoples archive their own history? What is the relationship between history and cultural memory? How is cultural memory embodied and enacted? How do cultural memory practices both challenge and constitute “official” history and nationalist discourse? What is the nature and use of a politics haunted by ghosts and oriented towards the past? In the first body chapter, I draw from websites created by South Vietnamese veterans—what I call a “subaltern digital archive”—to recreate a biographical sketch of Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn. This sketch is interwoven with a narration of the geopolitical context—the different events that were happening in the Asian Pacific during Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s lifetime. I acknowledge that all of history is a construction—a process of editing and making sense of the past—and thus I construct a history that centers, rather than effaces, Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn. The other two body chapters examine the cultural memory production surrounding Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn. One chapter highlights the ways in which South Vietnamese Americans engage in cultural memory practices, carving out a space in the present for the ghost of Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn. In these memory acts, Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn becomes a symbol for the Republic of Vietnam—a way for veterans to resurrect the ghost of this now-defunct state. Although South Vietnamese Americans’ resistance to state imposed narratives is admirable, I acknowledge that not everyone has the privileged to be so vocal. Thus in the next chapter, I highlight the oral histories of Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s family members, most of whom live in Việt Nam, and thus are not allowed to publicly commemorate their loved one. These are stories that exist only in the space of memory—that are absent from both official state histories as well as the online timelines created by South Vietnamese American veterans—timelines that focus of Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s military valor. Instead, Colonel Hồ Ngọc Cẩn’s relatives offer an alternate version of heroism—a more feminine version of heroism that appreciates Colonel Cẩn’s virtues and domestic contributions as well as his masculine victories. [1] Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7.

No description available.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1922, George Tompkins was found dead in an isolated area of Riverside Park. Though the media and evidence present pointed to Tompkins having been the victim of a lynching, the official ruling was that of suicide. Almost a century later, a multiracial, driven group of individuals set out to memorialize Tompkins as a victim of lynching and challenge the ruling that he had taken his own life. In discussing deaths such as George Tompkins’, it is vital to remind oneself that the victims of lynchings were more than just statistics in the ongoing epidemic of anti-Black violence that has permeated the history of the United States. By employing a victim-centered methodology, we can examine the lives of these victims before the worst happened to them and recognize the three-dimensionality of their lived experiences. This work examines the lived experience, lynching death, and memorialization process one hundred years later of George Tompkins. In understanding the means by which he lived, died, and was remembered, we can better understand the ways that this process can play a role in multiple contemporary communities.

While significant scholarly research exists on memorialization and commemoration, little exists on memorials to police officers, prison guards, border agents, and other penal system actors described as "law enforcement" or "peace" officers. This doctoral dissertation helps fill this gap by examining three questions: 1) How is penal system work staged and performed through the dramatic spectacle of national commemoration? 2) How does the memorialization of penal system actors as heroes generate and maintain support for punishment and the social distance between ordinary citizens and individuals in conflict with the law? 3) What myths are constructed and perpetuated through these memorials that legitimize the existence, expansion, and domination of punitive ways of thinking about and responding to criminalized conflict and harms? I explore these questions through a case study of "The Canadian Police and Peace Officers Memorial" (CPPOM) on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada through a thematic analysis and thick description of data from over 850 newspaper articles, 40 magazine articles, 19 semi-structured interviews, 18 survey responses, and participant observation at the memorial - including recently created running and cycling events. Rather than just a national day or annual gathering of authorities on the last Sunday in September, I argue that the CPPOM is also an overlooked penal system service, organization, and institution, which is integral to broader and growing attempts by police chiefs and associations, as well as other penal system actors and their families in Canada and the United States, to further expand and entrench penal system practices as central to the Canadian national identity through organizational memories and myths that work to increase support for penal system officers by staging them as prepared, professional, heroic, effective, and united. I reflect on the implications of the findings and future avenues for research on memorials like the CPPOM, whose birth in the late-1970s is shown to stem not simply from the "murder" of a rookie Ottawa police officer as is claimed during the memorial activities today, but also from a lack of preparedness and professionalism in the arrest of the person living with mental illness that led to the death of the rookie officer, as well as other national, local, and structural dilemmas facing penal system actors at the time. In examining and providing a new account of the origins, development, meanings, and role of the CPPOM, I contribute to the demystification, demythologization, and debunking of this national memorial, thus contributing to critical criminology and growing attempts to move beyond the punitive responses it naturalizes and legitimates. Although helping participants heal, connect, and move forward after death - which for some, occurs just one step or pedal stroke at a time - I show how the CPPOM is also a forgetful and misleading performance, which has consistently staged public criticism of policing as unfair and "violent crime" and a perceived lack of respect for police and the law as crises, not of mental illness, addiction, poverty, racism, or the real harms and limitations of policing and punishment themselves, but of a lack of law and order that can only be secured through the further entrenchment of penality and the work of "peace" officers.

Between 1914 and 1919, elite white people erected monuments across Virginia, permanently transforming the landscape of their communities with memorials to the Confederacy. Why did these Confederate memorialists continue to build monuments to a conflict their side had lost half a century earlier? This thesis examines this question to extend the study of the Lost Cause past the traditional stopping date of the Civil War semicentennial in 1915 and to add to the study of memorialization as a historical process. Studying the design and language of monuments as well as dedication orations and newspaper coverage of unveiling ceremonies, this thesis focuses on Virginia's Confederate memorials to provide a case study for the whole South. Memorialization is always an act of the present as much as an honoring of the past. Elite white Virginians built memorials to speak to their contemporaries at the same time they claimed to speak for them. Memorialists turned to the Confederacy for support in an effort to maintain their status at the top of post-Reconstruction Southern society. Confederate monuments served as permanent physical role models, continuing sectional reconciliation, encouraging women to maintain prescribed gender roles, and discouraging African Americans from standing up for their rights. American involvement in World War I exacerbated societal changes that threatened the position of the traditional white ruling class. As proponents of the Lost Cause squared off against the transformations of the Progressive era, Virginia's Confederate memorialists imbued monuments throughout the Commonwealth with messages meant to ensure their continued dominance. / Master of Arts

This research explores the new tradition of creating mass murder memorials in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century. Using written and oral history sources in combination with memorial designs, I explore the planning processes undertaken by five different communities: Virginia Tech, Columbine, University of Texas, Oklahoma City and Edmond, OK. I analyze what these case studies reveal about how changing cultural expectations and political needs transformed commemorative practices concerning violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By exposing how the timely interventions of national figures increasingly shaped local commemorative aspirations, my research illuminates how the brief period of national unity in the immediate aftermath has been discursively and materially foregrounded as the heart of national public memory narratives of mass murder. I argue that at the turn of the twenty-first century the memory of victims of mass murders"assuming something akin to the role that fallen soldiers have played for the bulk of American history"are now viewed by a range of political, religious and cultural actors as a highly effective means of bolstering perceptions of local, organizational and national unity. This project contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on commemoration in three ways. First, I challenge the literature on memorials built in the immediate aftermath of violence and tragedy by illustrating how these memory sites are increasingly but the first stage of the material culture of public memory. Second, my theory of a ritualized assemblage develops the existing literature by forwarding a concept well suited to analyze the relationship of between seemingly disparate memory sites. Lastly, the rhetoric of what I call the Myth of the Slaughtered Citizen contributes to the literature on nationalism and commemoration by explaining how the victims of mass murder were culturally substituted into the commemorative role traditionally held by fallen soldiers to promote a sense of local and national unity. / Ph. D.

How did the Daughters of the Republic of Texas use historic preservation to help create and perpetuate Texas nationalism? Historic sites are an important part of creating and maintaining a nation-state’s national identity, but even more so when the nation no longer exists. The DRT preserved and created a common Texas national history with the preservation and interpretation of the Alamo and the French Legation Museum. The Alamo is the principal symbol of the Texas identity. Before the Alamo was a place of state and national reverence, before it was a battle site, before it was the Alamo, it was a Spanish mission, San Antonio de Valero. Yet, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas reconstructed the history of the mission so as to include only the thirteen days (February 23- March 6, 1836) when it was the site of one of the most important and well-known battles in the War for Texas Independence. This interpretation decision has shaped the way the Alamo is viewed through our collective memory. The French Legation Museum in Austin is important to the story of nationalism in Texas. Although it is not as recognized as the Alamo, the French Legation Museum is a crucial component in the story of Texas as an independent republic. The French Legation gives Texans a physical history of the Republic of Texas, thus strengthening and perpetuating the Texas national identity. The DRT’s preservation decisions at Alamo and the French Legation perpetuate the memory of Texas as an independent republic, and thus preserve the Texas national identity. / text

This article explores the roles that porcelain portraits on grave markers play in identity construction and performance. Through semi-structured interviews, the biographies of five individuals are examined and then compared to determine norms or differences regarding their views on sepulchral photographs as a form of memorialization. While the decision to display a gravestone portrait could simply be a long-standing cultural practice, this interpretivist study indicates that the role of photo-tombstones is negotiated through a hybridization process involving religious syncretism, cultural convergence, or familial expectations. The role of photography as material culture is also examined, both as a metonymic replacement for the deceased and for its links to memory recall and remembrance.