Corry Shores
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496813275
- eISBN:
- 9781496813312
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496813275.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Comics Studies
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, ...
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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.Less
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.
Susan McHugh
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670321
- eISBN:
- 9781452947297
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670321.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became ...
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Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. The book traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. The book’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.Less
Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, this book argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and science in the past century. The book traces representational patterns specific to modern and contemporary fictions of cross-species companionship through a variety of media—including novels, films, fine art, television shows, and digital games—to show how nothing less than the futures of all species life is at stake in narrative forms. The book’s investigations into fictions of people relying on animals in civic and professional life—most obviously those of service animal users and female professional horse riders—showcase distinctly modern and human–animal forms of intersubjectivity. But increasingly graphic violence directed at these figures indicates their ambivalent significance to changing configurations of species.
