...Graphic novels have been especially successful when it comes to helping readers understand complex ideas, social relations, and abstractions that are often too difficult to put into words. One of the most famous graphic novels to date, Maus by Art Spiegelman is exemplary of this characteristic, seeing as it sheds light on the horrors of the Holocaust, one of the most difficult historical events to conceptualize. Using the unique format of the graphic novel and the literary elements of symbolism...
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...Effects of Dehumanization in Art Spiegelman’s Maus War broke out in Europe in September of 1939. Everything went downhill from then, Germans began to take over and minorities such as Jews were quickly forced to go to concentration camps, these horrible camps were stationed all over Europe. One of the main camps in Poland was Auschwitz. Opened in May 1940, it was an extermination camp located in southern Poland in a small town named Oswiecim. The camp consisted of three separate camps not far from one another so that communication could be kept between them. These three camps included: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Auschwitz III–Monowitz. Auschwitz I was classified as the base camp where prisoners mainly worked, Auschwitz II–Birkenau was the main extermination camp where prisoners went to die in a variety of ways after being too weak to work, and Auschwitz III–Monowitz another labor camp, which held prisoners who worked at a German chemical factory, IG Farben. The killing methods ranged from being lined up at a wall and shot to being put into ‘showers’ that realized a toxic gas. Once the prisoners were dead, they were then burned in the crematoriums at the camp. Essentially the prisoners of the labor and death camps were treated as objects and not as the humans that they were. Many might even go as far as refer to the Germans as heartless for doing the things that they did to the innocent Jews and other monitories. Art Spiegelman’s Maus shows the effects of the...
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...surface of Maus it is a story that revolves mostly around Vladek Spiegelman’s experiences in the Holocaust, but Masks and manipulation is one of the few themes of the book that has a greater picture of what the book entails. Vladek’s experiences during World War II go into brutal vivid detail of the persecution of Jews by German soldiers as well as by Polish citizens. Author, Art Spiegelman, has the reader reading through the usage of modifying points of view as Spiegelman structures several pieces of stories into a large story in order to portray his father’s Vladek’s history as well as the experience with his father while writing the book. Naturally, being aware of what the subject of Maus is has issues of race and class drilled in the book: plot, theme, and structure of Maus. At a level of generosity the issues are based off in the years of the mid 1930’s to winter 1944, an awful result of irrational racism that Mr. Spigelman describes and drew throughout the years of effectiveness and cruelty. Nonetheless, Maus deals with this issue in a different direction, more delicate ways, through the use of different animal faces to portray different races. The initial page of the book is graphic memoir, Mr. Spigelman cover page presents a comic. Maus’s prolong establishes the...
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...Hook: Deprived of food, sleep and family? Maus by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel, that takes the reader on a journey through the holocaust and WWII with Vladek Spiegelman, the Father of Art Spiegelman. Context: Vladek was separated from his wife and was just recently placed in Auschwitz. He was working as a tinman. Vladek is working at the Auschwitz tin shop, though he has never been trained in this profession. During this time, Anja is at Birkenau, a larger camp two miles to the south. Whereas Auschwitz is a camp for workers, Birkenau is just a waiting area for the gas chambers and crematoriums. Thesis: Spiegelman uses Perspective, Imagery and contrast to emphasize what Victimized people go through. Body Paragraph 1 P: Contrast is pivotal in Graphic novels it helps add emphasis to drawings and naturally gives more meaning to many different aspects. Contrast is used a lot in the E: The middle 2 panels. E: Through the use of shading the black background is contrasted to the white characters in the foreground. The black colour is dark and scary and there is a lot of it in this page, it highlights what the Jews were faced with. The pure white Colour of the jews in the foreground highlights the innocence of the Prisoners. This has a positive effect on the reader. By Contrasting the jews and Nazi’s it helps the reader understand the main Character and the plot of the story more. L: This links to the theme because it shows us the innocence of the victimized...
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...Before the war | 4 | 2.b | During the war | 5 | 2.c | After the war | 6 | 3 | Maus: Graphics and Symbolism | 6 | 4 | Comparative Analysis: Understanding the Characters | | 4.a | Sophie and Vladek | 8 | 4.b | Sophie and Anja | 9 | 4.c | Nathan Landau and Holocaust survivors | 10 | 4.d | Stingo and Art as narrators | 10 | 5 | Bibliography | 11 | Literature from the Holocaust: An Introduction “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human.” Adolf Hitler Official figures tell that six million Jews, two million Poles, one million Serbs, five million Russians were exterminated during World War II – the actual toll of executions by the Nazi Government, can never be estimated. Holocaust was a period of unspeakable horror and infernal ramifications which were not only felt across Europe but also in places like Laos. When I began this term paper, it was meant to be a study of the literature pertaining to this period of Nazi regime in Poland during World War II. What it turned out to be was a account of implacable and starkly real evil. A subject that has inspired countless movies, novels, real-life accounts, memoirs and poems, the holocaust continues to haunt the imagination of the world even today. It is not history bygone and forgotten, it is a demon that could never be truly obliterated from the lives and minds of the people. The following pages contain an analysis of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize Special Award recipient (1992), and one of the most loved...
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...Final Paper The Holocaust September 1st, 1939 marks the day in which the Holocaust began, a day we should never forget. Hitler had dreams to purify Germany and deem the Aryan race supreme however, he did not succeed. The strength and will power of the Jewish people to survive these unbearable times must be remembered for many generations to come. We must remember and teach about the incredible people who survived and give tribute to those who perished through documentation of the Holocaust, the community aspects, representation and religion of the Holocaust. Documentation of the Holocaust is very critical in teaching the future generations. Soon, all the survivors will be gone and it will be in the hands of our generation to tell the stories of the Holocaust. Several books and movies have been produced in memory of the Holocaust such as the Yizkor books. About “1,300 books have been published since the end of WWII”(Dr. Neil Jacobs) and they are great outlets of telling the stories of specific towns. For example, my Yizkor book project was on the city Dzialoszyce which was a thriving community in Poland. This book explains aspects of the town in the form of four main sections; “The Town and Its Residents Before World War I, Between Two World Wars, Customs and Traditions and The Holocaust” (Moshe Rozneck). In Dzialoszyce, societies were an integral part of everyday life in order to form a more communal lifestyle among the citizens. Another outlet of documentation was...
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...year time span of publication. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees that free speech should not be impeded. Many organizations, including the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, are continuing the legal battle of insuring the right of free speech remains unencumbered. Digital Freedom Fighters: Defending Free Speech in the 21st Century Introduction Comic books have been published for over 75 years with a varied subject matter including superhumans, gods, soldiers, historical events and animals. Originally conceived as a child’s reading fodder, comics have evolved beyond the original audience. A recent study found that over 98% of comic book readers are over the age of 18. (Pantozzi, 2012) No longer an art form exclusively for children, comics have been the target of many censorship attacks. With the advent of 21st century technology, comic books have evolved and the criticisms have evolved with them. Newer challenges to this form of speech can sometimes be overwhelming, but there are many organizations which are focused on protecting these freedoms. These are the digital freedom fighters. They are a safeguard against the rising censorship and regulation of free speech. Banning books and other forms of media is a not a new practice, but digital media has changed the censorship methods. With new censorship, new bypasses have also been developed such as different means of disbution. The legal embattlements have also greatly shifted....
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...Maus I and II have became two very impacting pieces of works that I’ve read about. Before reading, I was under the assumption these pieces wouldn’t be so detailed and realistic. Turns out I was wrong because the stories by Art Spiegelman in these two volumes were very dramatic and made me so intrigued to continue reading. A lot of this book has a whole lot of symbolism going on, simply because it’s in cartoon form. I thought it was a really creative way to tell a story by doing so in this type of book. It grabs the reader’s attention with the pictures, while also keeping their attention with the detailed story line. How I went about analyzing these books was to read a little, then recap and think about the exact emotions and what went on. It gave me a sense of having a second thought to make sure I understood what was going on. I realized that both Maus I and II were overall similar yet still had different themes some how. Maus I gave me a great detailed background of what Vladek had went through during World War II. During these chapters I was exposed to how the Germans were treating the Jews, and who the army would treat them so unfairly and racially. During the second book it was more of the actual story of Vladek’s experiences during the Holocaust. When he got taken and imprisoned in Auschwitz his real ‘troubles began’; which is an obvious title for the second volume because I agree, his troubles were just starting. I’ve always known about the Holocaust and how/what happened...
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...Having animals as characters introduces a friendlier imagery that helps darker content become more digestible. In Maus, seeing animals dying and tortured in place of actual people makes the event less offensive in the reader’s mind. Not to mention, there is an abundance of them, increasing replaceability and the dulling of our moral radar. We feel sympathy for the mice but it’s so weak that it has little noticeable impact on our moral intuition. Often, we allow the story to progress with no emotional interruptions. With human characters, we see ourselves in them and it makes it hard not to become biased or emotionally involved with certain characters. What Art wants for Maus is to relay his father’s experiences as authentically as possible. He intends to diminish our sense of attachment to the characters by using identical looking animals as characters to help us focus on the significance of the Holocaust itself. With the minimum emotional investment on the reader’s part, individual deaths become less significant and distracting while the frequency of general homicide itself becomes more noticeable, emphasizing the tragic nature of the Holocaust. Similarly, in Aggretsuko, where the main character is constantly oppressed and bullied into doing more work than her paycheck entitles, we see the depressing theme of work-life countered by adorable animal character designs and comedic tones...
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...Your Title Your name Institution Date (optional). GUILT is an emotion one gets when he/she believes or discovers that he/she did a wrong deed and valuated his/her standard social, moral or penal code ( Chaplin, 1975). The intensity of guilt varies from one person to another. When some individuals survive a horrific event, they get this overwhelming feeling of guilt and blame themselves for surviving the abominable situation that others did not survive. This state of mind is a mental condition and is sometimes termed as imagined guilt. It may be found in survivors of holocausts, natural disasters, mass murder and pandemics e.g. the 9/11 Oklahoma City bombings. While this guilt might not be experienced by everyone, it a research based phenomenon and has been proved to be real. The expression and amount of guilt varies from individual to individual. This condition was grouped as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, 2000). The survivors may or may not be consciously aware that they are feeling guilty. The holocaust was the carnage that took place where the Nazi, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, killed over six million Jews. Most of the Jews who survived suffered post-traumatic stress disorders. Symptoms include reverent memories of the traumatic event that took place, flashbacks of the event, physical and emotional stress due to something that is a reminder of the event and horrific dreams about the event. When...
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