Night
by Elie Wiesel
Lit.Log:
Part 5 : Bridging
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A MEMOIR AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?
A memoir (singular) is not the larger story of a life (from birth to death), but may be a slice of that life, a window into the life (through the author's lens), the shaping of a single piece of experience, a crystallized version of “I remember.” In the view of William Zinsser, “memoir assumes the life and ignores most of it. The writer of a memoir takes us back to a corner of his or her life that was unusually vivid or intense—childhood, for instance—or that was framed by unique events. By narrowing the lens, the writer achieves a focus that isn’t possible in autobiography.” Or in Barrington's words, memoir "makes no pretense of replicating a whole life. Indeed, one of the important skills of memoir writing is the selection of the theme or themes that will bind the work together."
Extracted from: http://www.writersandeditors.com/memoir__biography__and_corporate_history_58068.htm#bookmark5
Biography vs Memoir
Read the above extract and answer, in your own words, the following questions:
1. What is an autobiography?
2. What is a memoir?
3. Is Night by Elie Wiesel an autobiography or a memoir? Support your answer.
Elie Wiesel's Biography
1. Use the following form to write Elie Wiesel’s biography
2. Follow the instructions on Bio Cube and create your own cube
The work must be presented in class as part of the Log section Bridging!
Genocide in Modern Days
A mini-project
“Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately”.
–from Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
“I am obsessed with silence because of the silence of the world. I do not understand why the world was silent when we needed its outcry. I always come back to that problem. Where were the humanists, the leaders, the liberals, the spokesmen for mankind? The victims needed them. If they had spoken up, the slaughterer would not have succeeded in his task.”
While reading Wiesel’s memoir, people often ask: How did Hitler get away with this? How did the world allow it?
These are good questions, and ones we must still ask today. We are going to do an eye-opening assignment and perhaps we can keep asking those questions and get some answers.
For this mini-project, and as part of your “Bridging Text and Content”, you will be asked to research, in pairs, another modern genocide.
Here are some helpful sites:
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http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/index.html
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http://www.un.org/en/sections/what-we-do/deliver-humanitarian-aid/index.html
Click here to download the worksheet for this project.