Making Memory: Jewish and Christian Explorations in Monument, Narrative, and Liturgy [Paperback]

This is a book about living with the past. About about the process of constructing cultural memory, about the negotiation, implicit or explicit, between what is remembered, transmuted into narrative, handed on from generation to generation, and what is forgotten, unspoken, overlooked. Alana Vincent's underlying assumption is that the understanding of the past generated by such a process plays an essential role in shaping attitudes and actions of individuals and societies in the present. As well as memory, this book is about identity, imagination and the role they paly in liturgy. In 'Making Memory' Alana Vincent examines a sample of memorial sites and texts through which the boundaries between living (individual) memory, cultural memory, and history are constantly being re-negotiated. None of these is neutral. Each one is a construction; each both presents a particular interpretation of the event(s) it represents and is itself subject to interpretation and re-interpretation - the same process liturgy is subject to.

List of Illustrations
Foreword by David Jasper
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prelude

Part One: Remembering to Forget
1 Remembering Amalek
2 Antigone and Athenian War-dead: Body and Identity in the Greek tradition

Part Two: Mourning the Absent
Introduction
3 Anne of Green Gables and the Transformation of Public Mourning
4 Making Memory Solid: Jane Urquhart and The Canadian National Vimy Memorial

Interlude

Part Three: Absent Mourners
5 Worship in the Ruins
6 Outside the Sanctuary
Coda
Bibliography