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This essay poses the question of whether music, especially as regards its succession of expressive properties or states, is fruitfully thought of as a narrative of some sort. The answer returned is guardedly negative, and the attractions of an alternate model, one owing to the musicologists Anthony Newcombe and Fred Maus, of expressive music as dramatized rather than narrated emotion, are touted instead.

This chapter begins by stating the ‘problem’ of absolute music: what it is in or about absolute music that gives what appears, at least, to be the same kind of deep satisfaction that the other arts, the arts with content, give. The problem thus being stated, the unenlightened one would then be ready to hear that a proposed solution to the problem of absolute music, popular both in philosophical and music-theoretical circles, is to deny that absolute music does indeed want for literary content. But here the unenlightened one becomes puzzled. So how can the appeal of absolute music be explained by appeal to its narrative content? If it has narrative content, then it isn't absolute music? The simplicity of this disguises an insight worth pursuing, which the chapter does.

The coda concludes the book's analysis of the way in which particular texts become apocalyptically legible or manifest. It does so by taking account of Spiegelman's self-reflexive meditation on the ethical relation between Maus' literary reception and the dead bodies of the Holocaust that haunt his text. The coda proceeds to compare the fate of two sets of numbers tattooed onto the arms of Anja and Vladek upon their internment in the concentration camp. While Anja later commits suicide by slashing her wrists, thereby fulfilling a fate already inscribed by her number, Vladek is given life by the priest's prognosticatory interpretation of his number. The book concludes by utilizing Benjamin's concept of the “now of legibility” to read the priest's messianic moment of interpretation as a fragile moment of resistance against the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

This chapter demonstrates how one of the most striking features of Art Spiegelman's Maus are the characters' cartoon animal forms: Nazis are cats, Jews are mice, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, Brits are fish, the French are frogs, and Swedes are deer. However, his purpose was not to sanitize or “banalize” the Holocaust. Rather, the implementation of the animal forms serves as a shockingly evocative device that attests to the power of graphic novels as a means of persuasive communication and artistic expression. The chapter shows how a people's “becoming animal” is not something that degrades them, but is rather an instance of their having admirable skills at survival in trying circumstances.

This chapter includes a 2017 interview conducted by art historian Kim A. Munson with Pulitzer prize winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman about his touring retrospective Co-Mix, exhibition strategies, Masters of American Comics, narrative in exhibits relating to Maus and R. Crumb’s Genesis, Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode paintings, the wordless comics of Si Lewen, and the flattening of art history.

Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale are all discussed in this chapter in relation to the Shoah. It begins with the intended presumption that all these works bear witness in an honorable and honest way to the Shoah, or at least seek to give inheritance to the facts about it to readers. The chapter performs a “rhetorical reading” on the texts, studying the way this sort of reading operates its performative magic of testifying to the Holocaust. The question of community is also looked at with regards to these works. These works, however, are subject to the double obstacle, a complex “aporia”: the facts of the Holocaust might be inherently unthinkable and unspeakable by any means of representation and “aestheticizing” the Holocaust creates suspicion in that the more successful a novel, the further it may be from the actual experience of the Holocaust.

This chapter exaimes Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness and its testimony of the Holocaust. Fatelessness being Kertész’s first novel was published some thirty years after his liberation from the concentration camps. The novel itself is not autobiographical, nor is it perceived by Kertész to even be a novel. Employing sophisticated novelistic techniques, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old boy from Budapest who is transported and survives Auschwitz—bearing some resemblance to Kertész’s own experience. Fatelessness along with Black Dogs and Maus all share the same element of being narrated in the first person. This suggests that writings about the experience of the Holocaust hold more bearing when done in the form of testimony rather than in the third person. Thus the central question of this chapter relates to the possibility of a work of fiction as an illustration bearing witness to the Holocaust.

This chapter considers Lanzmann’s film Shoah and Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus in light of the epistemology of testimony. Two epistemic dimensions are involved: (a) propositional knowledge, conveyed by reports from speaker to listener; and (b) expressive knowledge, which under proper circumstances elicits appropriate responsiveness from the listener. The justification of testimonial knowledge is developed by considering work by Wittgenstein and Richard Moran. Shoah and Maus exhibit contrasting but complementary asymmetries in their aesthetic presentations of testimonies: Shoah eschews all historical illustration of the narratives (propositional knowledge) being recounted by the witnesses, but does focus, at times invasively, on the faces of the witnesses as they recount their narratives. By contrast, Maus eschews the portrayal of human faces (instead they are imaged as various kinds of animals) while illustrating the content of the eyewitness’s testimony (the story of Spiegelman’s father during the Holocaust). Sartre’s theory of the imaginary, suitably modified in light of subsequent criticisms of it, explicates the witness’s and viewer’s distinctive roles in these works as required by the aesthetic presentation. In this way both artworks, each in its own way, fulfill the dual desiderata of Holocaust artworks.

The last two decades have witnessed a significant transformation of comic books as far as types and content available are concerned, not to mention their critical reception. This shift can be traced to certain events in the production and distribution of comics, particularly superhero comics. However, the singularly most important phenomenon in the reevaluation of comic books was the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (collected in 1986 and 1991) and the critical response it generated. This chapter examines public and academic discourses on the status and nature of comic books in the wake of Maus. After providing an overview of the development of comics that led to the creation of Maus, it assesses its impact, the changing view of comics in the press, and the burgeoning of academic work on comics art. The chapter then considers the scholarly debate over the periodization of graphic novels such as Maus and comments on the campaign by Fredric Wertham and others in the 1950s against comic books, which they accused of causing juvenile delinquency. Finally, it looks at two museum exhibitions showcasing Maus.

Published in two volumes in 1986 and 1991, Maus is a Holocaust narrative by Art Spiegelman that has precipitated a broad reassessment of the artistic potential of the comic book. Its success has led the American media to realize the potential of comics for intellectual and artistic sophistication like any other art form. Maus has garnered the attention of literary critics and has been the subject of numerous scholarly publications. This chapter examines the canonization of Maus through its inclusion in the anthologies published by W. W. Norton, Inc., such as Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1st ed., 1997), The Norton Anthology of Jewish American Literature (1st ed., 2001), and The Norton Anthology of American Literature (7th ed., 2007). It also considers the book’s affinities with postmodern fiction and the literary criticism it has generated with regard to its representation of the Holocaust, its treatment of gender, and its use of the beast allegory. Finally, the chapter looks at the underlying racism of such allegories as understood by Spiegelman in relation to American cartoons.

This chapter explains the relationship between public and private photographs and the way images move between public and private space, through an analysis of how public photographs are privatized and vice versa in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. It highlights the neverending interaction between words and images, and examines how photography haunts writings and drawings even in the absence of actual photographs. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the graphic trace of missing photographs becomes the conveyor of significant absences and losses.