Thursday, December 17, 2009

MAUS II

Once again I don't know what to write about for this essay. So once again I made a simple search on Google and found an interesting interview with Art Spiegelman and Harvey Bloom. Anyway, I fumbled through it until I came across something that had to do with postmodernism (because I don't know how this book relates to it, and I wanted some help) and I found some things.
First of all just the genre that it is in helps to classify it as a postmodern work. The whole, "deconstruction" idea, like trying to break something down, or in Bloom's words, "Postmodernism also implies genre meltdown, so that it gets very hard to classify things, including distinctions between fact and fiction." Its not the traditional comic book. The comic book itself it deconstructed to its simplest form, the form that McCloud refers to as, "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce and aesthetic response in the viewer."
Well, I still dont know what i'm going to write about, and I definately dont have a halfway decent thesis idea, but here are some intersting things I picked up on as i read...
First of all, the irony and self awareness that it employs. I think it's in the 1st chapter when Art and Francoise are driving, and he, says something like, "You'd never let me talk this long in real life." It knows its a comic, and it not trying to be anything more than that by pretending it is actual representation of the holocaust.
2ndly, some of the irony includes two people who die after surviving the entire camp of Auschwitz. The first and probably more obvious is Anja, who committs suicide. I'm guessing she did this out of some sort of guilt, like she didnt feel worthy or something to be alive after tons of people were killed. She must've felt like she hadent done anything special, or that she was just lucky. Either way, its an ironic situation. Another example of this is on page 132. You can go read it if you want but basically one of the guys made it through and got hung right at the very end.
These are just some of the things that I thought were interesting and maybe i could develop them farther when it comes time for me to write this essay.

1 comment:

  1. Nice work, Trent. This is what I'm talking about. The research you've done will pay off big time. Looking forward to your paper.

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