After spending the day not really doing anything too important… aside from homework and a brief adventure to McDonalds (gross), I finally decided to stop ignoring this blog. The thought of having to read and write about something just didn’t sit well with my exceptionally lazy mood. But I eventually decided to stop watching Boy Meets World and doing nothing and work, woohoo.
After looking around the Internets, trying to find a sufficient article in regards to Maus II that I actually liked and was actually relevant and interesting, I finally stumbled into this one and I was quite satisfied. I really liked all of the points that this article touched and also it’s from the UK which just makes it even more awesome in my opinion (British is bloody brilliant). Anyways, I finally found an article that took my fancy and I was happy to end my search.
Philip Pullman talks about “the craftmanship, emotion and truth that make the masterpiece that is Art Spiegelman's illustrated Holocaust history, Maus I and II,” and I found his take on it to be quite insightful. What I liked the best about his article was that he mentioned the confusion with what to label Mause II as, “what is it? Is it a comic? Is it biography, or fiction? Is it a literary work, or a graphic one, or both? We use the term graphic novel, but can anything that is literary, like a novel, ever really work in graphic form? Words and pictures work differently: can they work together without pulling in different directions?” I just thought that that was cool since we have been discussing the ins and outs of literature and what defines something to be literature. Also one of our prompts relates to this since it asks us how to categorize this text. It even goes in depth by bringing in other sources to support his point of view.
I also enjoy how it talks about the animal representations of the different groups of people mentioned in the book, and even brings in the wearing of masks and the conflicts that revolve around the representations of the story.
I also quite liked his mentions of the comic structure of the novel and how it adds to the effect of the story. He also makes a point how just because a literary work contains pictures, it doesn’t necessarily have to take away from the depth of the story and it can, in fact, help the reader have a better understanding of the story. He mentions how the illustrations create a deeper meaning that might not have been properly portrayed otherwise, “take the full-moon shape against which the characters are silhouetted at important points in the story of Maus, as if on a movie poster… the full-moon shape is bitter as well as sweet… The shape carries a charge of irony: we see it and feel it in a glance.”
He talks about various significant things in the book, not only in context but also in form, and gives the reader a better outlook on Maus. I am really happy that I happened upon this article and it has really helped me in choosing the direction I will be going in with regards to my essay. British people are awesome and they help me :D (another example would be Sir Ken Robinson, he was awesome.)
Also in my search for articles I found this article (click me) and the writer says that when she “[thinks] of the Holocaust now I will always think of Vladek Spiegelman,” which I think is kind of funny since one of Art Spiegelman's intentions is that people don’t make Maus to be the grand narrative of the Holocaust.
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