Art Spiegelman's Maus Essay

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Spiegelman's Maus became quite a success upon its release and had especially received well-deserved awards for the brilliant content, storytelling and history in in the two-volume set. But with great success comes criticism, whether it is meant to be good or bad. In Hye Su Park's Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: A Bibliographic Essay, the scholar serves a broad survey of Maus criticism based on ten thematic categories with the focus of four such as: narratology, auto-biography, and history/post-history (Park, 146). Park believes that some scholarly criticism have quite effective views while others are limited in their opinions and do not explore the depth of the Maus text. Narratology explores the interest in how formal aspects of the text, the system and the construction of the storyworld, further highlights and complicates the thematics of Maus (Park,158). An example would be in the fourth figure to the top left, Vladek and Artie's interactions with one another. …show more content…

McGlothlin divides Maus into three strands of narrative: story(Vladek's holocaust experience), discourse (his retelling of the experience to Artie), and narrating (Artie's reshaping Vladek's narrative, and forming it into his form of visual narrative (Park, 158). In the figure below, it is the end of another interview session with Vladek, and the way that Art translates this off-topic conversation serves to understand his visual narrative by translating words to re-imagined