Module 13: Graphic Novels

Module 13: Graphic Novels

Book: Maus

Author and Illustrator: Art Spiegelman

Plot

            The author-illustrator traces his father's imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp through a series of disarming and unusual cartoons arranged to tell the story as a novel. Many of the history of the War, The Holocaust, and the plight of Eastern European Jews during the time of Hitler’s reign but not many have read about personal accounts of the experience. In Maus, the reader will not only delve into the world of those interned but also realize that reality and fantastical horror are not all that different when the villain id both human monstrous at the same time.

Impression of the Book

Art Speigelman's novel MAUS is quality literature because it is able to deliver a heavy and heart wrenching story through illustrations and narrative that not only causes the reader to re-examine just exactly what a graphic novel is but allows the reader to ponder about the books subject matter (the Holocaust). Despite the subject matter, the book is more approachable to for highschool students and adults alike because of the way it is formatted; just like certain best-selling books now have a graphic novel versions-Twilight Saga, Skeleton Key, Maximum Ride etc.- targeted for reluctant readers and fanatics of graphic novel literature,  MAUS approaches the telling of a crazy time in history by delivering it through a method that softens the hard blow of the story's reality (it has been proven that graphic novels are more likely to be read by reluctant readers and helps the reading process for those who don't like to read). History is tough enough in the classroom and even harder to read from a textbook but, when read through a graphic novel, history somewhat becomes less real and easier to accept and read. The drawback is that the subject matter become watered down but MAUS is sort of an anomaly to this. The subject matter is still sad, and gruesome, and real and the literature is still good literature...the drawings are pretty vivid as well. The appeal of the book derives from the heart of the author; history buffs will enjoy the book because of its honesty and light touches of deprecating humor while new readers or students who have teachers assign the novel as work or textbook (this is my third semester of having this book as required reading 1.) Holocaust and Representation 2.) History of the Holocaust 3.) SLIS 5420) will be grateful for the opportunity to read a novel that they may never have picked up or given a thought, let alone a second thought.

           

Implementation of Book in Library Setting

            This novel is a great book to introduce The Holocaust to kids about to enter High School. It would be a great conversation starter on the subject of genocide, war, and the implications of both in the world. It would be a great introduction to Graphic Novels and showing that not all Graphic Novels are about Superman or Anime.

           

Reviews

            “…When critics of Maus do examine questions of form, they often focus on the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form's aesthetic capabilities--its innovations with space and temporality.(n6) Paul Buhle, for instance, claims, "More than a few readers have described [Maus] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason" (16). Where Michael Rothberg contends, "By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, 'comic' space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz" (206), Stephen Tabachnick suggests that Maus may work "because it depicts what was all too real, however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutally stark manner. The black and white quality of Maus's graphics reminds one of newsprint" (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationship between form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form, all too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicitly rejects.(n7)

As with all cultural production that faces the issue of genocide, Spiegelman's text turns us to fundamental questions about the function of art and aesthetics (as well as to related questions about the knowability and the transmission of history: as Hayden White asserts, "Maus manages to raise all of the crucial issues regarding the 'limits of representation' in general" [42]). Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation of aesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, "Cultural Criticism and Society" and "After Auschwitz"--and later in the enormously valuable "Commitment" (1962), which has been the basis of some recent important meditations on form.(n8) In "Cultural Criticism" Adorno charges, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (34).(n9) We may understand what is at stake as a question of betrayal: Adorno worries about how suffering can be given a voice in art "without immediately being betrayed by it" ("Commitment" 312); we must recognize "the possibility of knowing history," Cathy Caruth writes, "as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of how not to betray the past" (27, Caruth's italics). I argue that Maus, far from betraying the past, engages this ethical dilemma through its form. Elaborating tropes like "the presence of the past" through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the "stylistic surface" of a page (Complete Maus),(n10) I will consider how Maus represents history through the time and space of the comics page….”- Chute, H.

APA Citation

Chute, H. (2006). The Shadow of a Past Time": History and Graphic Representation in "Maus. Twentieth Century Literature, 52(2), 199-230.

Spiegelman, A., & Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: 1. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.