Maus, Comix,

1
Maus, Comix, its Controversies
2
Questions 1.     Form Genre If Spiegelman
incorporates these photographs to capture a
historical reality, why does he remediate them in
comic book format?  2.     Ethics Should
Spiegelman repeat these images? Should he be
subjecting these Holocaust victims to the
prurient gaze again? 3.     Ethics Should
one produce Art out of Auschwitz, particularly
art that is so solipsistic in nature? (We have
the author visiting a psychiatrist!) 4.    
History Is Spiegelman telling history properly?
Does he simply produce a history of
representation (through a series of photographs,
films, comic strips), or does he force us to
reflect on the mediation manufacturing of
history into a series of iconic images,
afterimages, unreliable memories)?
3
Ted Rall on Maus for Village Voice
(1999) Calling Maus a holocomic, Rall says
Spiegelman is the man who helped make the
holocaust accessible to a lazy public, and a
figure who has become a lightning rod for
controversy wherever his work appears in print.
4
New Art Spiegelman, A Problem of Taxonomy,
Letter to editor of the New York Times, Dec. 29,
1991

• To the Editor I'd like to thank The Times for
  its recognition and support of my book "Maus II."
  I was delighted to see it surface on your
  best-seller list (Dec. 8). I never expected my
  work to reach such heights (my mice never dressed
  for success). Delight blurred into surprise,
  however, when I noted that it appeared on the
  fiction side of your ledger. (see next slide)

5

• Art Spiegelman, A Problem of Taxonomy, cont . .
  .
• It's not as though my passages on how to build a
  bunker and repair concentration camp boots got
  the book onto your 'Advice, How-to and
  Miscellaneous' list. It's just that I shudder to
  think how David Duke - if he could read - would
  respond to seeing a carefully researched work
  based closely on my father's memories of life in
  Hitler's Europe and in the death camps,
  classified as fiction. I know that by
  delineating people with animals heads Ive
  raised problems of taxonomy for you. Could you
  consider adding a special nonfiction/mice
  category to your list?

6
Art Spiegelman on the Holocaust and the
Comic-Book (from The Complete Maus CD ROM) 
 The language I speak is comics. Im a rotten
ballet dancer. So it would never be possible for
me to make Maus as a ballet . . . . If you
hear someone has taken on the genocide of the
Jews in comics form, it sounds like a terrible
idea. But using animals allows you to
defamiliarize the events, to reinhabit them in a
fresh way because they are coming at you in a
language you are not used to hearing.
7
(No Transcript)
8
(No Transcript)
9
Maus I, pg. 136
10

• Vladeks Speech
• In the book
• How amazing it is that a human being reacts the
  same like this neighbors dog. (II.82)
• On tape
• How amazing it is that a human being is like a
  dog.

11
Mouse as Visual Metonym
Mouse as Visual Metaphor
DefinitionsMetaphor the term for one thing is
applied to a distinctly different kind of
thingie. My love is a red, red rose Metonym
the term for one thing is applied to another
thing with which it is closely associatedie.
crown land
12

• Art Spiegelman says all art is a kind of lying,
  a process of selection historians engage in
  this as well as novelists. (Complete Maus CD Rom)