God on the Gallows: Reading the Holocaust through Narratives of Redemption
Karen Spector
“Where is God now?” is a question from the Holocaust memoir Night by Elie Wiesel and an underlying narrative dilemma for the teachers and most student participants in this qualitative study of three Holocaust units in secondary English classrooms in the Midwestern United States. Using a narrative theory framework, this study explores how religious narrative frames are used by participants to construct Jews and the Holocaust through their readings of Night, and more generally how students wield such narratives in their pursuit of meaning. Also informed by the work of Holocaust scholars, educational researchers studying shifting narrative identity, and those studying the nexus of civic pluralism and religious framing, I build a bridge from which to view the ways participants constructed meaning about the Holocaust and the implications for teacher candidates, teachers, and teacher educators. Given that Holocaust literature such as Night and Anne Frank: Dairy of a Young Girl are now canonical texts in English classes throughout the United States, and given that lessons of tolerance or civic pluralism are often expected to accompany the reading of this literature, throughout the paper I discuss the affordances and constraints of the narratives that students in this study used. I end by making recommendations for classroom practice.
Research in the Teaching of English, Volume 42, Number 1, August 2007
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