Monuments and Memorials
In this essay, students will choose a specific monument, memorial, or artistic tribute which alludes to a historical event or person, and then write an analysis of the struggle for power that the monument represents. In addition to analyzing the statuary itself, and the rhetorical appeals that it makes to viewers, the paper should include a discussion of the problem, or struggle, that is embedded in the statue’s existence.
What is being contested here? Who is empowered by it, and who is disempowered? What story is it telling us about history?
Your choices include but are not limited to the following:
Specific Confederate Statuary in the US
Mt. Rushmore
Comfort Women Statue in Chinatown
Statuary of Junipero Serra
Crazy Horse
You can also choose to write about some other commemorative statue, holiday, or symbol, for example, celebrating Columbus Day, the renaming of a building, street, or school, or the commemoration/lack of commemoration, of a slave site or site of an atrocity.
If you choose something not on the list here, please get my permission before going on with your paper. Note: the choice must include an element of power management, in other words, there needs to be a conflict inherent in the object.
Your paper will begin by describing the statue or memorial and the features in it from a rhetorical perspective, paying particular attention to Kairos – that is, when the statue was created, and how it may have subsequently changed.
Your goal in this essay is not only to demonstrate a clear and specific understanding of the ideas and arguments presented in the monument, but also to show you understand why the monument is a site of struggle. In addition, you need to assess the nature and validity those ideas and arguments and put those ideas into context with recent events, using facts and ideas you have gathered from your readings. This assessment should be based on careful discussion of specific elements from both the monument itself, and the texts we’ve read so far.
Your paper will use some outside research to do this, and must be cited in MLA citation.
Make sure you quote at least once from the Hua Hsa article, “The New Monuments America Needs” in order to frame, or contextualize, your thesis.
Here are some of the questions you may wish to answer about the monument. What is the purpose of the monument? How does it make its claim? What rhetorical strategies are in play to make that argument? What are its strengths and weaknesses, its most appealing and most unattractive elements?
Criteria for Evaluation:
Thesis: Your essay should articulate and focus on a clear and contestable claim about the work you are discussing. Your claim may address the validity of the work’s right to exist, the effectiveness of its form/style, its relevance to matters in the news today, or some combination of these, but in any case your thesis needs to be an assertion that requires support, NOT a mere description or an obvious statement of fact with which no one could possibly disagree.
In other words, rather than say, “The Confederate statuary in Congress reflects historical prejudices that are worth preserving,” you need to say something more broad, like, “The Confederate statuary in the US Congress commemorates men who fought to preserve racism and by so doing, allows us to remember that these men were once considered to be heroes of the state. Because it reflects real attitudes of real people, it has a right to be preserved in our nation’s capital.” This thesis will give you more scope to write your paper.
Evidence/Support: Your claims about the text(s) you’re discussing will only be convincing if you support them with concrete evidence in the body of your essay. Your paper is an argument about the monument, so you will have to bring in outside evidence.
Organization: There is no one right way to organize your paper (for example, there’s no specific number of paragraphs every paper should have). Rather, the form or paper should be determined by what you want to say (the claim you make and your support of it, the questions you take up, etc.). Still, there are a few guidelines you should keep in mind when structuring the paper. First, the paper should have a clear introduction that brings the reader into the subject of your discussion and set up (in general terms) the overall course of your paper. You can do so in an introductory paragraph or two that draw the reader’s attention to the topic of the paper, summarizes the text(s) you will be discussing, and presents your thesis statement. As noted above, a thesis statement that includes an overall claim as well as supporting reasons/points will provide your reader with a brief “map” of the paper. That is, he or she will be able to anticipate the general course followed in the body of the essay. Each paragraph should be focused on a single manageable topic, announced in an opening or “topic” sentence. Finally, transitional words, phrases, and sentences can help you make links between your paragraphs and larger points clear for your reader.
A general outline for your paper is as follows:
Introduction (including description of monument and context)
Rhetorical Analysis: what is the struggle for meaning it invokes and how it is arguing?
Argument: What do you think?
Conclusion: Why does it matter?
