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9781438460772

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...an impressive work of seminal scholarship and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library collections. - Midwest Book Review

...an insightful contribution to the fields of museum studies, memory studies, and rhetorical studies. - CHOICE ...an impressive work of seminal scholarship and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library collections. - Midwest Book Review

Drawing on material from the USHMM's institutional archive, including meeting minutes, architectural renderings, visitor surveys, and comments left by visitors, Figures of Memory is both a theoretical exploration of memory-its relation to identity, space, and ethics-and a practical analysis of one of the most discussed memorials in the United States. The book also extends recent discussions of the rhetoric of memorial sites and museums by arguing that sites like the USHMM don't so much make a case for events through the act of memorialization, but actually displace memory, disturbing it-and the museum visitor-so much so that they call it into question. Memory, like rhetorical figures, moves, and the USHMM moves its visitors, figuratively and literally, both to and beyond the events the museum is meant to commemorate.

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Michael Bernard-Donals is Nancy Hoefs Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His books include Forgetful Memory: Representation and Remembrance in the Wake of the Holocaust, also published by SUNY Press, and Jewish Rhetorics: History, Theory, Practice (coedited with Janice W. Fernheimer).

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