

" In our discussion of Art Spiegelman's Maus, we have been reading about Vladek and Anja's experience of the escalating persecution of the Jews in Poland, and I have just referred to my father's experiences as a Jewish student in Hitler's Germany. As much as Maus is about a representation of the Holocaust, it is also about a story of one family whose image is reflected through.Rose stares at me in disbelief "You no jew. Artie, as a second-generation survivor of the Holocaust, is burdened with the fallout of the historical event while not having encountered it firsthand. But it is also about a survivor of another sort, Vladek's son, Artie, who struggles to find his way into his father's Holocaust memory that has become a significant part of the family history. Maus is about a Holocaust survivor, Vladek, who lived through the concentration camps at Auschwitz and is still bound by what he witnessed and experienced. As the confusion surrounding the genre placement of Maus suggests-is it a memoir, a testimony, or an autobiography?-its constructed hybridity becomes a central question.

The critical space Maus occupies in graphic narrative criticism is crucial not only because it had won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize-specifically, for Special Awards and Citations-Letters-but also because it is so richly textured, both at the formal and thematic levels. The critical success of Meta Maus, however, will largely depend on how effectively this project reshapes and further reinforces one's reading of Spiegelman's graphic text. This enthusiasm for Maus is likely to continue with the upcoming publication of Meta Maus, a book with a DVD about the making of Maus. More than twenty years since its publication, Maus continues to draw much scholarly attention, including the two most recent critical pieces by Paul Eakin (3) and Tal Bruttmann (4) in 2009. Indeed, Maus has proven to be a seminal text in graphic narrative studies and has been taught in many undergraduate and graduate courses worldwide. The 1998 edition of The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction includes excerpts from Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale, (2) the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative told in comics form, along with two other graphic works by Jay Cantor and Lynda Barry. Scott McCloud, one of the leading critics in comics studies, was a keynote speaker at the 2008 International Conference on Narrative.
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As evidence of this, at least three literary journals, (1) plus this special Jewish comics issue of Shofar, have devoted issues to graphic narratives. The growing popularity of the study of the graphic narrative as a critical literary exercise is visible in both university classrooms and many other academic venues. This overview of Maus criticism thus not only provides a useful summary of the studies currently available, but also serves as a suggestive guide for future scholars in their attempts to broaden and enrich the field with an eye on expanding the critical discourse. As much as this essay examines the wide range of scholarly interests surrounding Maus, it also highlights the problem of repetitive concentration on certain themes that dominates and restricts discussion on the text. This bibliographic essay on Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale serves as a broad survey of Maus criticism based on ten thematic categories such as trauma, postmemory, generational transmission, and the use of English.
