Maus Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jeanne C. Ewert

Critical Essay by Jeanne C. Ewert

SOURCE: Ewert, Jeanne C. “Reading Visual Narrative: Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Narrative 8, no. 1 (January 2000): 87-103.

In the following essay, Ewert argues that the significance of Maus as a representation of the Holocaust lies in the “visual register of the narrative” and notes that critics must “must retrain themselves to see these textual devices in Spiegelman's work.”

Much attention has been paid to the place of Art Spiegelman's Maus in the world of comics and cartooning by the historians of that genre,¹ while the positioning of Maus—a highly mediated autobiography, both personal narrative and at one remove from its subject—as a Holocaust memoir is the subject of ongoing debate in the community of Holocaust scholars.² Few scholarly studies, however, have focused on Maus as a visual narrative: its graphic arrangement of narrative layers and frames, its pictorial treatment of narrative time, and its efforts towards formal unity, exemplified by...
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