MAUS NOW

An omnibus of criticism attests to the enduring legacy of Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece.

Editor Chute, a scholar who specializes in graphic narrative in general and Spiegelman in particular, curates a collection that draws on works from around the world (including pieces translated from German and Hebrew for the first time) and different disciplines (journalism, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology). The book includes pieces from the 1980s, before Maus had been published in book form in 1992 (it was serialized from 1980 to 1991), and it extends into the current political climate, when it remains hailed as a cultural milestone but is also often threatened with banning from libraries and school curricula. The contributors examine an array of pertinent questions: What does it mean to translate such a uniquely devastating experience into the form of a comic? What is the relationship between the artist and his subject and between father and son? Is it unseemly for such a work to provide entertainment or even meaning in the wake of the Holocaust, not to mention profit and prestige for its creator? How can the creator re-create something he was too young to experience, despite interviews and extensive research? There is much information on Spiegelman’s successful request to have the book shift from the New York Times bestseller fiction list to the nonfiction list as well as the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize. The exhaustive obsessiveness of Maus criticism seems by now to have transcended the Joycean level, but the contributors present convincing cases that the work can bear such critical weight. From Ken Tucker’s visionary review of the early work in the Times through Marianne Hirsch’s introduction of “postmemory” to describe Spiegelman’s relationship to the material, the essays are sure to generate dialogue among literary historians, critics, and scholars as well as the legion of Maus mega-fans across the globe. Other contributors include Adam Gopnik, Philip Pullman, and Alisa Solomon.

A valuable resource for the cottage industry of Maus research.