...Graphic novels have been especially successful when it comes to helping readers understand complex ideas, social relations, and abstractions that are often too difficult to put into words. One of the most famous graphic novels to date, Maus by Art Spiegelman is exemplary of this characteristic, seeing as it sheds light on the horrors of the Holocaust, one of the most difficult historical events to conceptualize. Using the unique format of the graphic novel and the literary elements of symbolism...
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...surface of Maus it is a story that revolves mostly around Vladek Spiegelman’s experiences in the Holocaust, but Masks and manipulation is one of the few themes of the book that has a greater picture of what the book entails. Vladek’s experiences during World War II go into brutal vivid detail of the persecution of Jews by German soldiers as well as by Polish citizens. Author, Art Spiegelman, has the reader reading through the usage of modifying points of view as Spiegelman structures several pieces of stories into a large story in order to portray his father’s Vladek’s history as well as the experience with his father while writing the book. Naturally, being aware of what the subject of Maus is has issues of race and class drilled in the book: plot, theme, and structure of Maus. At a level of generosity the issues are based off in the years of the mid 1930’s to winter 1944, an awful result of irrational racism that Mr. Spigelman describes and drew throughout the years of effectiveness and cruelty. Nonetheless, Maus deals with this issue in a different direction, more delicate ways, through the use of different animal faces to portray different races. The initial page of the book is graphic memoir, Mr. Spigelman cover page presents a comic. Maus’s prolong establishes the...
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...Effects of Dehumanization in Art Spiegelman’s Maus War broke out in Europe in September of 1939. Everything went downhill from then, Germans began to take over and minorities such as Jews were quickly forced to go to concentration camps, these horrible camps were stationed all over Europe. One of the main camps in Poland was Auschwitz. Opened in May 1940, it was an extermination camp located in southern Poland in a small town named Oswiecim. The camp consisted of three separate camps not far from one another so that communication could be kept between them. These three camps included: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Auschwitz III–Monowitz. Auschwitz I was classified as the base camp where prisoners mainly worked, Auschwitz II–Birkenau was the main extermination camp where prisoners went to die in a variety of ways after being too weak to work, and Auschwitz III–Monowitz another labor camp, which held prisoners who worked at a German chemical factory, IG Farben. The killing methods ranged from being lined up at a wall and shot to being put into ‘showers’ that realized a toxic gas. Once the prisoners were dead, they were then burned in the crematoriums at the camp. Essentially the prisoners of the labor and death camps were treated as objects and not as the humans that they were. Many might even go as far as refer to the Germans as heartless for doing the things that they did to the innocent Jews and other monitories. Art Spiegelman’s Maus shows the effects of the...
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...Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a famous, Pulitzer Prize winning tale about the journey of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. Despite the amount of similar storylines, Spiegelman’s creativity with the normal elements of comics has won him high praise. This analysis will focus on Spiegelman’s unique twist on icons, layouts, diegesis, abstraction, and encapsulation as displayed by Maus. Icons are pictures that are used to embody a person, place, thing, or idea. McCloud hammers this concept home by drawing random things, such as a cow (McCloud, pg. 26), but reminds the reader that it is technically not a real cow. It is just an image. In Maus, Spiegelman’s characters are icons; he utilizes everyday, commonplace animals to represent the humans in the plot. The type of animal portrayed is dependent on the nationality of the human being resembled. The Jewish characters, such as Vladek and Art, are depicted as mice (pg.11, top left panel), the Polish are drawn as pigs (pg.28, bottom panel), the Germans are cats (pg. 33), and the Americans are dogs (pg. 125, bottom right). These animalistic icons aid the reader in clearly distinguishing between the different groups of character, establishing a prevalent a motif of predator vs. prey, as well as revealing common traits of each group. Abstraction is the process of breaking down an image to a more simple form, allowing the viewer to focus on specific details. Spiegelman strategically uses abstraction in his style when drawing his characters....
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...can identify an archival turn. Art Spiegelman’s Maus first and perhaps most forcefully established the connection between archives and comics. His groundbreaking work documenting his father’s experience in WWII Poland, where he survived internment in Auschwitz, is a visual narrative based on oral testimony that consistently heightens our awareness of visual, written, and oral archives, and where they interact, overlap, or get transposed one into the other. Hillary Chute recounts and interprets her collaboration with Spiegelman in the process of assembling MetaMaus, a book compiling interviews and archival materials on the making of Maus. MetaMaus, argues Chute, reflects the tension between different kinds of extant archives—oral, written, photographic—and the cross-discursive work of (re)building new archives that motivates Maus. Its defining feature is that it shows the materiality of Spiegelman’s archive; it is about the embodiment of archives. The subject of Maus is the retrieval of memory and ultimately, the creation of memory…. It’s about choices being made, of finding what one can tell, and what one can reveal, and what one can reveal beyond what one knows one is revealing. Those are the things that give real tensile strength to the work—putting the dead into little boxes. – Art Spiegelman (MetaMaus 73) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale is a book about archives. And the book about making Maus, MetaMaus, is both a process of taking stock of the Maus archive and an active process...
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...magazines with poorly drawn pictures and silly stories of men in their tights. Later on, McCloud became a comic book artist and begun to have a deeper appreciation for the medium(McCloud, 2). In his book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, McCloud gives graphic novels a different definition: Sequential Art. The term was coined by the late graphic novelist, Will Eisner and defined it as an art form that uses images deployed in sequence for graphic storytelling or to convey information (McCloud,5). With regards to this topic, this can also be seen in Art Spiegelman's critically acclaimed graphic novel, Maus....
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...what the narrator says to be true. In Art Spiegelman’s Maus, neither Artie nor Vladek could be considered reliable narrators due to Artie being the author of the book thus being able to edit his book however he saw fit, and Vladek is unreliable because his recollection of the Holocaust has a large bias since he only encountered one side of the Holocaust and his memories could be skewed by his age. Artie is not a reliable narrator because he is both the author and narrator and because he has allowed his relationship to his father to bias his perspective. Art Spiegelman chose to show his relationship with his father in the book. “Simultaneously it is a sharp study of the tension that exists between father and son, and the story of the writing of the book itself” (Grossman “Maus…”). Due to him being the author and editor of the book, one cannot trust Artie because he could have edited anything he wanted in order to portray the tension between him and his father in a different light than what it really was. Throughout the novel, Art and Vladek have intense arguments, the most passionate being the final one where Art leaves his father, calling him “Murderer” (159). When taken out of context, it seems a bit extreme for Art to call his father a murderer. But, the way Art wrote about his mother and included the very personal strip that he wrote about her, makes the reader feel for his side of the argument. The more pressing matter should be whether Art made the situation with his father...
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...“When first I came home it looked exactly so as before I went away… (74),” Vladek begins recalling his past experiences to his son Art. In Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art is the son of a Polish Jew who writes and records his father’s memories of the horrendous holocaust. This ability to create multiple perspectives is known as frame narrative, allowing the readers to learn more insight about the characters such as thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Although the comic itself is seen through Art’s eyes, words, and sketches, it is Vladek’s story that is being represented. Art Spiegelman did a wonderful job of incorporating numerous smaller narratives into one graphic novel with his constant use of two very important literary devices. The use of...
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...In Maus, Spiegelman attempts to tell his grandfather’s experience in the Holocaust in addition to displaying the current state of his relationship with his grandfather. Instead of simply portraying the characters as human, however, Spiegelman chose to represent each figure in the novel as a certain type of animal based on the character’s religion or nationality, creating an imitation of the Holocaust. While some might assume that this seemingly playful representation of an event as serious as the Holocaust is extremely disrespectful, Spiegelman explains in Metamaus, a book about Maus, that the “animal masks that allowed [him] to approach otherwise unsayable things. What makes Maus thorny is actually what allows it to be useful as a real ‘teaching tool’” (Spiegelman, Metamaus, 127). Rather than mocking the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s choice to depict the characters in his book as animals enabled him to delve deeper into the core of his grandfather’s story without offending anyone as well as making it appeal to a wider audience. Spiegelman adds to his reasoning behind the animal masks later in Metamaus: “Paradoxically, while the mice allowed for a distancing from...
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...seconds) Search Results NY Voices - Interview with Art Spiegelman - Thirteen www.thirteen.org/nyvoices/transcripts/spiegelman.html WNET ART SPIEGELMAN: No, MAUS ended up being kind of a crossover hit. ... LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL says, I guess the message of that film was something like, if you ... Maus I and Life is Beautiful Comparison Essay - Term ... www.studymode.com › Home › Geography Jul 22, 2014 - Maus I and Life is Beautiful Comparison Of all the Holocaust movies that exist, one in particular stands out. directed by Roberto Benigni in 1997 ... "Life Is Beautiful" vs. Maus Ii - College Essays - Noura41298 www.termpaperwarehouse.com › English and Literature Oct 2, 2014 - "Life Is Beautiful" vs. Maus Ii. There have been many re-tells of Holocaust survivor stories. For example, Maus II and “Life is Beautiful” are two ... Maus/Life is Beautiful Compare/Contrast rubric - RCampus https://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=S52W55&sp... iRubric S52W55: Compare/Contrast essay scoring rubric.. Free rubric builder and assessment tools. Works inspired by Maus | Analysis of Art Speigleman's ... mausgraphicmemoir.blogspot.com/2012/.../works-inspired-by-maus.htm... Jul 5, 2012 - Maus was serialized in the Raw magazine from 1980 to 1991. ... Roberto Benigni's 1997 italian film Life is Beautiful, original titled La vita è ... Analysis of Art Speigleman's Memoir MAUS mausgraphicmemoir.blogspot.com/ Jul 26, 2012 - Maus I is a memoir about his fathers life and experiences while...
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...Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale—And Here My Troubles Began The Holocaust was one of the worst epidemics in the entire world. Many people were killed, more importantly the Jewish community, with millions dead. Families were torn and never mended. Among these families were the Spiegleman’s. Art Spiegleman was the son in the family who wrote about his father’s experience in the Holocaust. Maus I and Maus II are his two works of art that share historical information and his personal struggle. Within Maus II, Art talks about the start of his father’s struggles and what will be the beginning of a life changing event. The Holocaust affected victims just as the American Great Depression did its victims. This chapter starts out with Vladek continuously counting his pills, and then Artie and Francoise are staying with him just for a little since Mala left. Vladek keeps everything; he doesn’t want to get rid of anything, even crumbs. In chapter three, page 78 of Maus II, he is trying to give Artie a piece of fruitcake, and Artie refuses, and says he isn’t hungry. Vladek then tells Artie, “So, fine. I can pack the fruitcake in with the cereal for you to take home,” then Artie refuses to let Vladek give him the food because he doesn’t want it. Vladek then says, “I cannot forget it…ever since Hitler I don’t like to throw out even a crumb.” This shows that Vladek is still afraid to get rid of anything, because he is still in fear of the past. They begin talking more about Auschwitz, and how in...
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...Humans? The very dramatic and dark, graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman invites us readers to a hands on account of a Polish Jew’s horrific journey through the unforgettable Holocaust. Maus is not the ordinary comic that you would typically read, but instead, exemplifies another level of genre that fights the “norms” of a comic. Art Spiegelman takes his audience outside of their comfort zone and creatively imbeds a plot twist. For example, as stated in, Understanding Comics, McCloud simply states, “Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights” (McCloud 2). Yet, we observe nothing of this sort of depiction either through imagery or language. Within this graphic novel, there are harsh depictions of Jews, Poles and Germans. The careful detail to language and cruel words are loaded with intense tone. As the readers, we encounter several historical points-of-view that Vladek Spiegelman presents: the pre-Holocaust, the Holocaust, and the post-Holocaust that he unearths, layer by layer. He engages his readers through his vivid traumatic encounters along with the sad misfortunes that took place during the Holocaust. Art Spiegelman’s audience can be directed towards those who are engaged by historical autobiographies and, equally so, an audience who seeks to revel in the pain and suffering of others; also he provides a way to understand catharsis. Art Spiegelman invites those who dare to unravel one man's...
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...Spiegelman’s Maus is a graphic novel which explores events of the holocaust and the uniting of a father and son. Though often overlooked the dedications play an integral role in better understanding the text. The dedications do not influence the meaning of the book but do reinforce events in the book. Spiegelman dedicates the first book to his mother as an attempt to rid himself of the guilt associated with his mother’s suicide. In an attempt to not have the same short comings as his father, Art associates his most prized work with the most prized people in his life. Richieu is often disregarded in the book however he is vital in Spiegelman’s eyes. The book in its entirety is highly important as it is a dedication to a whole race. Anja is thought to be Artie’s only parent as she is the one that raised him and made him who he is. The dedication to Anja acts as a medium through which Artie tries to apologise to his mother for the grief that he caused her and also a way to thank her. In the Prisoner on The Hell Planet, Art reveals the last moments that he shared with his mother and how all he said to her was “Sure Ma!” in a dismissive tone. This seemingly rude gesture towards his mother wasn’t Spiegelman but rather the LSD induced depression and anxiety. Despite this, Spiegelman was berated for the way he had treated her and this added to what he described as an overwhelming guilt where it was him against the world. While driving to Vladek’s, Art reveals that he used...
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...Surviving the Holocaust as a Comic Book Art Spiegelman’s MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale is uniquely suitable to study the holocaust and literature because of its innovative qualities such as a graphic novel, its detailed biography of a witness of the Holocaust in Poland, and its complex sroey of that witess as a survivor in the United States. MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale gives readers new insight into literature because of its form as a graphic novel. “We don’t need more genteel synonyms. We need to examine and redifine the words we inherit” (Spiegelman “Eyeballs”). Emotion is being assigned to abstract icons, it has become a predicament. The word “retarded” symbolizes a mental disorder, but it has been over used, and now carries a meaning of offensive criticism. “…Working relentlessly to sharpen students’ reading skills…hopes the graphic-novel rage at the school had something to do with it” (Solomon). Schools are hoping that reading comic books will help students in school, and they are preferred due to their illustrations. Also, reading, even comic books, will help improve FCAT scores, which will help the school. Cartoons are especially effective since people can recognize the drawing and characterize it into someone by age, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, and feelings (Spiegelman “Eyeballs”). Comic strips were made from stereotypes. Stereotype means to give a solid form to, and was invented as a way of making relief-printing plates. MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale also serves as an...
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...MAUS Character Summaries Art Spiegelman | Art Spiegelman is the author and narrator of Maus, and also one of the story's main characters. Born in Stockholm after the Holocaust, he is the only surviving child of Vladek and Anja Spiegelman. His brother, Richieu, died as a child during the war, and his mother committed suicide in 1968 when he was twenty years old. He has a history of mental illness and is married to Francoise, a French woman who converted to Judaism upon their engagement. Maus centers around two primary narratives: Vladek's experiences as a Jew in World War II Poland, and Art's relationship with his aging father. This second narrative follows a period of time in Art's life beginning around 1978 and ending sometime shortly before Vladek's death in 1982.When the story opens, Art lives in New York and does not see his father very often, though he lives only a short distance away in Queens. But as Art begins to draw this story about Vladek's Holocaust experiences, he begins to visit his father more and more frequently. Their relationship is strained, as Vladek's gruff demeanour and unwillingness to spend money routinely infuriate his son. Art is filled with complex feelings towards his father ranging from admiration for his survival in Auschwitz, to frustration towards his aggravating tendencies, and guilt for his own neglect of a father who has lived through so many difficult times.Art also has complex emotions towards the Holocaust. Though he did not live through...
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