Reading Art Spiegelman

By Philip Smith

Book Overview

The horror of the Holocaust lies not only in its brutality but in its scale and logistics; it depended upon the machinery and logic of a rational, industrialised, and empirically organised modern society. The central thesis of this book is that Art Spiegelman's comics all identify deeply-rooted madness in post-Enlightenment society. Spiegelman maintains, in other words, that the Holocaust was not an aberration, but an inevitable consequence of modernisation. In service of this argument, Smith offers a reading of Spiegelman's comics, with a particular focus on his three main collections: Breakdowns (1977 and 2008), Maus (1980 and 1991), and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). He draws upon a taxonomy of terms from comic book scholarship, attempts to theorize madness (including literary portrayals of trauma), and critical works on Holocaust literature.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815386478
• ISBN13: 9780815386476
• Release Date: January 2018
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.49 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"