We’ll start on Tuesday with a close look at some pages in the book. Here are some we might start with, but we’d like to hear from you too.
mice and rats (1:147)
Parshas Truma dream (1:57-60); see also the scholarly essay by Stephen E. Tabachnick linked below.
Prisoner on Hell Planet (1:100-103)
“murderer” (1:158-59)
Still thinking about narrative frames (Anja’s and Vladek’s trip to the sanitarium, framing the story in the prologue with the place and date as the very first thing, presenting the oral history interview, etc.), have a look now at this little mini-lecture on narrative theory and Maus. This is from November 2022, when Barbara and I taught a seminar for high school teachers through the National Humanities Center; we had a couple hundred teachers in that on-line seminar.
If you’re interested in the deep dive, here are a few scholarly readings we’ve mentioned or that I mention in the narratology mini-lecture:
- Dori Laub “Bearing Witness: Or the Vicissititudes of Listening” in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychanalysis, and History (NY: Routledge, 1992), link here. This was one of the primary essays that helped us understand the roles and positions and ethics of witnessing and testimony.
- a second chapter from that same volume, also by Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony, and Survival”; link here.
- Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Images and the Work of Postmemory” in The Yale Journal of Criticism, volume 14, number 1 (2001): 5–37. Link here. This is really important essay for helping us think about photographs and memory in this context.
- Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29:1 (Spring 2008): 103-128. Link here.
- Stephen E. Tabachnick, “The Religious Meaning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 22:4, (Summer 2004): 1-13. Link here. I’ve posted this in response to a reading question about the significance of Parshas Truma (1:57-60)
Go here to fill out a form with questions and comments and observations about the readings or anything else on your mind for discussion at our meetings.
