Literature and History

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how in "Maus I and II", Art Spiegelman, uses the comic book genre to explain the complex and un-comical of one Holocaust survivor's tale and the transmission or testimony of this tale to the son. It looks at how "The Hunger of Memory" is Richard Rodriquez's autobiographical story of growing up and achieving success in white America and how it has affected his relationship with his own culture. It also looks at how in "The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron has written a story taken from an actual event in American history and digs deep into the psychology behind Nat Turner's 1831 slave revolt. It analyzes how all three books a slice of time is explored in a sort of first person narrative and how each looks at the human side of historical events and how the times and the events shaped their lives.

From the Paper:

"Art Spiegelman uses the comic book format for telling his story of his family's experiences during the Holocaust. His use of cats (the Nazis), mice (the Jews), pigs (the Poles) and other national stereotypes is designed to focus the reader's mind on the complex issues that occurred during the Holocaust. The use of the comic book genre is intended to amplify the process of compression, simplification and devaluation not merely of the Nazi's practices before and during the Holocaust, but the reduction and simplification present in many responses to the Holocaust as well. Spiegelman moves through several different historical subject-positions and narrated events to tell his story. Not only is there the pre-holocaust, the Holocaust, and the post holocaust, but also, within one time frame, there can be other times and places co-present as well."

More papers on Literature and History:

• Analytical Essay # 136266 : "Theme of History in "Stones" and "History Lesson"
• Analytical Essay # 53811 : "Modernist Literature and the Denial of History"
• Research Paper # 63689 : "Literature in History"

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