Transcript Art Spiegelman - Heath High School

Art Spiegelman
Maus
Art Spiegelman
• Born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden (where his parents were taken
after the war)
• Art grew up in New York City (Queens)
• From 1966-1989, he worked for Topps Chewing Gum. He illustrated
trading cards and stickers (including Garbage Pail Kids)
• Art suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in
the 1960s.
• In 1968, his mother committed suicide.
• He was an instructor for the School of Visual Arts
• He was a writer for The New Yorker
• He wrote Maus in 1986 based on the events in the lives of
his mother and father in WWII.
• Maus earned his the Guggenhein Fellowship and a
Pulitzer Prize
• He currently lives in Manhattan with his family.
About Maus
• Maus is unclassifiable. It is both biography and autobiography; it is a
nonfiction, comic book, prose, and history.
• When Maus was first released, it was placed on the fiction bestseller
list; however, Spiegelman called and requested it to be placed on the
nonfiction list due to it biographical/autobiographical content.
• There are three generic narratives woven through Maus :
• 1. kunstlerroman- the development of the artist, conveyed through
the present day sequences showing Spiegelman dealing with his
creative anxieties as he makes his story
• 2. bildungsroman – the maturation of the invidual, conveyed
through the depiction of Art’s addressing his relationship with his
parents and their effect on him
• 3. hero story – the hero, Vladek, passes enormous danger
The Cat-Mouse Thing
• The animal characters are metaphors for the
racial and political conflicts of Germany and
Poland in the 1930s and 1940s
• Cats: Germans—Cats are known to be cunning, sly,
manipulative, and selfish. They are beasts of
prey. They also have sharp claws which are
normally retracted and hidden, but can damage
when provoked.
• Mice: Jews—Mice are known to be small,
unobtrusive, quick, skittish, and easily frightened.
They mostly live hidden in holes or out of the way
places.
The Cat-Mouse Thing
• Pigs: Poles—Lazy, sloppy creatures who have no real ties to
the cat and mouse games.
• Pros: Using animals reflects the comic tradition of animal
fables
•
Using animals provides a metaphor for the Nazi-Jew
relations
•
Using animals makes it easy to differentiate between
the races
• Cons: Using animals creates stereotypes which might be
problematic
•
Using animals oversimplifies political issues
• Using animals might detract from the seriousness of the
subject matter