Here are excerpts from two students’ responses to reading Elie Wiesel’s Night in my course called “Representations of the holocaust”:
I guess my frustration comes from my confusion about what my relationship should be towards this book. I feel a little out of sorts as a reader. I think of a memoir as closer in relationship to a novel than a textbook, and so I’ve been expecting of it some of the attention and creativity of form that a novel shows. But is that wrong of me? Is a holocaust memoir addressing something too sacrosanct to employ the same devices that a novel or creative memoir about another topic does? I really don’t know, and I feel disappointed with myself for feeling disappointed by the form of the narrative.
Some events initially seemed too perfectly metaphorical to be reality. But I had to remind myself that such things did happen. In such extreme circumstances, there is no metaphor and there is not the unimaginable—we are forced to accept that it is reality and we are forced to imagine the unimaginable, as terrible as it is, for that is the only way we can attempt to empathize.
I guess my frustration comes from my confusion about what my relationship should be towards this book. I feel a little out of sorts as a reader. I think of a memoir as closer in relationship to a novel than a textbook, and so I’ve been expecting of it some of the attention and creativity of form that a novel shows. But is that wrong of me? Is a holocaust memoir addressing something too sacrosanct to employ the same devices that a novel or creative memoir about another topic does? I really don’t know, and I feel disappointed with myself for feeling disappointed by the form of the narrative.
Some events initially seemed too perfectly metaphorical to be reality. But I had to remind myself that such things did happen. In such extreme circumstances, there is no metaphor and there is not the unimaginable—we are forced to accept that it is reality and we are forced to imagine the unimaginable, as terrible as it is, for that is the only way we can attempt to empathize.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
