2: Excerpts, Ruth Franklin, "A Thousand Darknesses," 2010.

2: Excerpts, Ruth Franklin, "A Thousand Darknesses," 2010.

Literary critic Ruth Franklin considers the question of truth and fictionality in writing about the Holocaust in her prize-winning 2010 book. She emphasizes that “every canonical work of Holocaust literature involves some graying of the line between fiction and reality.” 

Suggested Activity: Ask students to consider what it means that all texts are “mediated” and to suggest examples of how “aestheticizing influences” and “narrative conventions” affect the telling of a story. One possible activity to illustrate this would be to have students tell a simple story from their day, and then to ask all students in the class to retell the story using different conventions or constraints. 

Source: Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.