Reading Art Spiegelman

Philip Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317352426
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

The horror of the Holocaust lies not only in its brutality but in its scale and logistics; it depended upon the machinery and logic of a rational, industrialised, and empirically organised modern society. The central thesis of this book is that Art Spiegelman's comics all identify deeply-rooted madness in post-Enlightenment society. Spiegelman maintains, in other words, that the Holocaust was not an aberration, but an inevitable consequence of modernisation. In service of this argument, Smith offers a reading of Spiegelman's comics, with a particular focus on his three main collections: Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991), and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). He draws upon a taxonomy of terms from comic book scholarship, attempts to theorize madness (including literary portrayals of trauma), and critical works on Holocaust literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Formal Experimentation and Emotional Breakdowns
• 2 Historiography and Survival in Maus
• 3 The Story of a Story: In the Shadow of No Towers
• Conclusion: Divinest Sense
• Index