{"product_id":"maus-now-isbn-9780593315774","title":"Maus Now","description":"\u003cb\u003eRichly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman’s \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e (“the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e), \u003ci\u003eMaus Now\u003c\/i\u003e includes work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and academics—including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and Adam Gopnik—on the radical achievement and innovation of \u003ci\u003eMaus,\u003c\/i\u003e more than forty years since the original publication of “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it’s hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district’s English language-arts curriculum demonstrates.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaus Now: Selected Writing\u003c\/i\u003e collects responses to Spiegelman’s monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material’s complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections— “Contexts,” “Problems of Representation,” and “Legacy”—and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on \u003ci\u003eMaus.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003eis revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world’s best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.\u003cb\u003eContexts\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003ePhilip Pullman\u003ci\u003e Behind the Masks \u003c\/i\u003e(2003)\u003cbr\u003e Joshua Brown \u003ci\u003eOf Mice and Memory\u003c\/i\u003e (1988)\u003cbr\u003e Ken Tucker \u003ci\u003eCats, Mice, and History: The Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip \u003c\/i\u003e(1985)\u003cbr\u003e Adam Gopnik \u003ci\u003eComics and Catastrophe: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the History of the Cartoon\u003c\/i\u003e (1987)\u003cbr\u003e Kurt Scheel \u003ci\u003eMauschwitz? Art Spiegelman’s “A Survivor’s Tale” \u003c\/i\u003e(1989)\u003cbr\u003e Dorit Abusch \u003ci\u003e“The Holocaust in Comics?”\u003c\/i\u003e (1997 and 2021)\u003cbr\u003e Thomas Doherty\u003ci\u003e Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust \u003c\/i\u003e(1996 and 2020)\u003cbr\u003e Stephen E. Tabachnick \u003ci\u003eOf \u003c\/i\u003eMaus \u003ci\u003eand Memory: The Structure of Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel of the Holocaust \u003c\/i\u003e(1993)\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eProblems of Representation\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Marianne Hirsch \u003ci\u003eMy Travels with \u003c\/i\u003eMaus,\u003ci\u003e 1992–2020\u003c\/i\u003e (1992, 1997, 2012, and 2020) \u003cbr\u003e Nancy K. Miller \u003ci\u003eCartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer—Art Spiegelman’s \u003c\/i\u003eMaus (1992)\u003cbr\u003e Michael Rothberg\u003ci\u003e “We Were Talking Jewish”: Art Spiegelman’s \u003c\/i\u003eMaus\u003ci\u003e as “Holocaust” Production\u003c\/i\u003e (1994) \u003cbr\u003e Alan Rosen\u003ci\u003e The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s \u003c\/i\u003eMaus (1995)\u003cbr\u003e Terrence Des Pres \u003ci\u003eHolocaust\u003c\/i\u003e Laughter? (1988) \u003cbr\u003e Andreas Huyssen \u003ci\u003eOf Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno\u003c\/i\u003e (2003) \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eLegacy\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Robert Storr \u003ci\u003eMaking\u003c\/i\u003e Maus (1991) \u003cbr\u003e Hillary Chute \u003ci\u003e“The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in\u003c\/i\u003e Maus (2006)\u003cbr\u003e Ruth Franklin \u003ci\u003eArt Spiegelman’s Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited \u003c\/i\u003e(2011)\u003cbr\u003e Pierre-Alban Delannoy\u003ci\u003e Spiegelman, in Nobody’s Land \u003c\/i\u003e(2009)\u003cbr\u003e David Samuels \u003ci\u003eQ\u0026amp;A with Art Spiegelman, Creator of\u003c\/i\u003e Maus (2013)\u003cbr\u003e Hans Kruschwitz\u003ci\u003e Everything Depends on Images: Reflections on Language and Image in Spiegelman’s \u003c\/i\u003eMaus (2018) \u003cbr\u003e Alisa Solomon \u003ci\u003eThe Haus of \u003c\/i\u003eMaus:\u003ci\u003e Art Spiegelman’s Twitchy Irreverence\u003c\/i\u003e (2014)\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNotes \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eWorks Cited \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eSelected Further Writing on \u003c\/i\u003eMaus \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eContributors\u003c\/i\u003e“This is a thought-provoking collection of pieces that explore topics that \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e touches on, and is a must-read if you’ve read Spiegelman’s books.”—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eBook Riot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“At a time when book banning is on the rise—and, indeed, the very nature of truth is under attack—this omnibus investigates relevant questions . . . Chute’s book, which contains a generous selection of illustrations, features such luminaries as Ruth Franklin, Adam Gopnik, Marianne Hirsch, Alisa Solomon, and Philip Pullman, all coming together to create a valuable resource for the cottage industry of \u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003eresearch.”\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003e—\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eHILLARY CHUTE\u003c\/b\u003e is an American literary scholar and an expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and the author or editor of seven titles on comics, including, most recently, her book, \u003ci\u003eWhy Comics? From Underground to Everywhere\u003c\/i\u003e. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e By Hillary Chute\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eIn the Shadow of No Towers, \u003c\/i\u003ehis most recent book of comic strips, Art Spiegelman draws connections between his experience of 9\/11 and his survivor parents’ experience of World War II, suggesting that the horrors of the Holocaust do not feel far removed from his present-day experience in the twenty-first century. “The killer apes learned nothing from the twin towers of Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” Spiegelman writes; 9\/11 is the “same old deadly business as usual” (np). Produced serially, Spiegelman’s \u003ci\u003eNo Towers \u003c\/i\u003ecomic strips were too polit­ically incendiary to find wide release in the United States; they were largely published abroad and in New York’s weekly Jewish newspa­per, the \u003ci\u003eForward. In the Shadow of No Towers \u003c\/i\u003epowerfully asserts that “the shadow of a past time [interweaves] with a present time”; to use Spiegelman’s own description of his Pulitzer Prize–winning two-volume work \u003ci\u003eMaus: A Survivor’s Tale \u003c\/i\u003e(Silverblatt, 35). In one telling panel there the bodies of four Jewish girls hanged in World War II dangle from trees in the Catskills as the Spiegelmans drive to the supermarket in 1979.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The persistence of the past in \u003ci\u003eMaus, \u003c\/i\u003eof course, does figure prominently in analyses of the text’s overall representational strategies. We see this, for instance, in Dominick LaCapra’s reading of the book’s “thematic mode of carnivalization” (175), Andreas Huyssen’s theorizing of Adornean mimesis in \u003ci\u003eMaus, \u003c\/i\u003eand Alan Rosen’s study of Vladek Spiegelman’s broken English.3 Most readings of how \u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003erepresents history approach the issue in terms of ongoing debates about Holocaust representation, in the context of postmodernism, or in relation to theories of traumatic memory. But such readings do not pay much attention to \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e’s narrative form: the specificities of reading graph­ically, of taking individual pages as crucial units of comics grammar.  The form of \u003ci\u003eMaus, \u003c\/i\u003ehowever, is essential to how it represents history. Indeed, \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e’s contribution to thinking about the “crisis in represen­tation,” I will argue, is precisely in how it proposes that the medium of comics can approach and express serious, even devastating, histories.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “I’m \u003ci\u003eliterally \u003c\/i\u003egiving a form to my father’s words and narrative,” Spiegelman observes about \u003ci\u003eMaus, \u003c\/i\u003e“and that form for me has to do with panel size, panel rhythms, and visual structures of the page” (Inter­view with Gary Groth, 105, emphasis in original). As I hope to show, to claim that comics makes language, ideas, and concepts “literal” is to call attention to how the medium can make the twisting lines of history readable through form.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When critics of \u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003edo examine questions of form, they often focus on the cultural connotations of comics rather than on the form’s aesthetic capabilities—its innovations with space and temporality. Paul Buhle, for instance, claims, “More than a few readers have described [\u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e] as the most compelling of any [Holocaust] depiction, perhaps because only the caricatured quality of comic art is equal to the seeming unreality of an experience beyond all reason” (16). Where Michael Rothberg contends, “By situating a nonfictional story in a highly mediated, unreal, ‘comic’ space, Spiegelman captures the hyperintensity of Auschwitz” (\u003ci\u003eTraumatic Realism, \u003c\/i\u003e206), Stephen Tabachnick suggests that \u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003emay work “because it depicts what was all too real, however unbelievable, in a tightly controlled and brutally stark manner. The black and white quality of \u003ci\u003eMaus\u003c\/i\u003e’s graphics reminds one of newsprint” (155). But all such analyses posit too direct a relationship between form and content (unreal form, unreal content; all too real form, all too real content), a directness that Spiegelman explicitly rejects.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e As with all cultural production that faces the issue of geno­cide, Spiegelman’s text turns us to fundamental questions about the function of art and aesthetics (as well as to related questions about the knowability and the transmission of history: as Hayden White asserts, “\u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003emanages to raise all of the crucial issues regarding the ‘limits of representation’ in general” [42]). Adorno famously interrogated the fraught relation of aesthetics and Holocaust representation in two essays from 1949, “Cultural Criticism and Society” and “After Auschwitz”—and later in the enormously valuable “Commitment” (1962), which has been the basis of some recent important meditations on form. In “Cultural Criticism” Adorno charges, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (34). We may understand what is at stake as a question of betrayal: Adorno worries about how suffering can be given a voice in art “without immediately being betrayed by it” (“Com­mitment,” 312); we must recognize “the possibility of knowing history,” Cathy Caruth writes, “as a deeply ethical dilemma: the unremitting problem of \u003ci\u003ehow not to betray the past\u003c\/i\u003e” (27, Caruth’s italics). I argue that \u003ci\u003eMaus, \u003c\/i\u003efar from betraying the past, engages this ethical dilemma through its form. Elaborating tropes like “the presence of the past” through the formal complexities of what Spiegelman calls the “stylistic surface” of a page (\u003ci\u003eComplete Maus\u003c\/i\u003e)\u003ci\u003e, \u003c\/i\u003eI will consider how \u003ci\u003eMaus \u003c\/i\u003erepresents history through the time and space of the comics page.","brand":"Pantheon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304413057253,"sku":"NP9780593315774","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593315774.jpg?v=1767732432","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/maus-now-isbn-9780593315774","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}