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As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. But monumentality is not restricted to statues or buildings. In this course we will study alternative forms of monumentality, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. These alternative monumentalities — primarily literary, but including various material- and object-based expressions, and elaborations on institutional modes of monumentality — have assumed significance especially in minority and diaspora communities, and for other people and peoples outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The primary case studies in this course will be forms of Holocaust commemoration, including the post-Holocaust large-scale Yiddish literary projects meant to serve Jewish communities in search of new forms of memorialization; and counter-monuments like Germany’s Stolpersteine (stumbling stones). We will also consider contemporary debates around monuments in America and global manifestations of alternative monumentalities. All readings in English.