This presentation is presented by Kaushal Desai in International Virtual Conference on 'Humanities through Literature, Film and Media' Organized by School of Social Sciences and Languages Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai. October 19-20, 2021 Abstract Literature has verity of genres and sub genres to explore and the one is Graphic novels. In recent time this field has many concepts to look out for and to explore. It has depth which is presented in many of the works by many of the graphic writers. Art Spiegelman, an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel Maus. The novel has the historical concepts which presented in pictorial way as Graphic novel. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus, which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. It could be argued that 1986 was the year of the graphic novel. This year included the publication of the first volume of Maus. Holocaust Wounds and Trauma which is explored in Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel Maus: A Survivor’s Tale will be devoted to the study of Art Spiegelman’s account of his parents’ holocaust survival story. The research will take into account of author’s personal trauma due to his mother’s suicide; his father’s post-holocaust eccentricities and his difficulty in internalising holocaust trauma transmitted through family. As research also present new historicism and culturalism of the time of this Graphic novel Maus. It also take related issues like Jewish diaspora and exile; scientific racism, biological determinism and eugenics; anti-Semitic canards; Nazi regime as state of exception; Aryanisation and dehumanisation will all come under this research work. Keywords: Graphic Art, Graphic novels, Holocaust, New Historicism, Culturalism

1. A Critical Study of Art Spiegelman’s Maus:
Graphic Art and The Holocaust
Kaushal H. Desai
(Research Scholar)
Department of English
Shri Govind Guru University, Godhra
International Virtual Conference on
'Humanities through Literature, Film and Media'
Organized by
School of Social Sciences and Languages
Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai
October 19-20, 2021

2. Comic art, "low definition, deep
involvement" in Marshall McLuhan's
terms is the visual medium most
congenial to caricature and low blows.
Graphic Art

3. Graphic Art in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
The pivotal inspiration for Spiegelman's cat and
mouse gamble was the visual stereotypes of Third
Reich symbology, the hackwork from the
mephistoes at Goebbels's Reichsministry and
Julius Streicher's venomous weekly Der Sturmer -
the anti-Semitic broadsheets and editorial
cartoons depicting Jews as hook-nosed, beady-
eyed Untermenschen, creatures whose ferret faces
and rodent snouts marked them as human vermin.
(figs. 1-2)

4. Holocaust in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
The risky artistic strategies and the
“strangeness” of its form, to use
Harold Bloom’s term, are essential to
how the author represents the
horrors of the Holocaust: by means
of anthropomorphic caricatures and
stereotypes depicting Germans as
cats, Jewish people as mice, Poles as
pigs, and so on.
Maus often focus on the cultural
connotations in the context of
postmodernism and in the Holocaust
literature tradition, diminishing the
importance of its hybrid narrative
form in portraying honest, even
devastating events.

5. Holocaust in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
“Maus: My father bleeds history”
Spiegelman interviewing his father
Racial violence
Zionism
Cultural & Historical manifestation
This idea is palpable in an early scene in which
Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, is riding an exercise
bike;

7. Holocaust survivor’s testimony
anthropomorphic caricatures and stereotypes
visual surface it dehumanizes its victims
visual metaphors diminish the catastrophic magnitude of the
events
challenges the real comic-book mentalities
James E. Young (1998) points out, Art Spiegelman does not
attempt to represent “events he never knew immediately but
instead portrays his necessary hyper mediated experience of the
memory of events. This post-war generation, after all, cannot
remember the Holocaust as it actually occurred” (p. 669).

8. Thanks!
Kaushal H. Desai
1.https://sites.google.com/view/kaushaldesai

9. Referances
● Art Spiegelman, "A Problem of Taxonomy," The New York Times Book Review, 29
December 1991, 4. Spiegelman did suggest a possible compro- mise: that the Times add a
special "nonfiction/mice" category.
● Art Spiegelman, Maus I:A Survivor's Tale: My FatherBleeds History (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1986) and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1991). Subsequent ref- erences to Maus are cited parenthetically.
● “Art Spiegelman Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps.” Teacher‟s
Study Guide. Vancouver Art Gallery, 16 Feb. 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2016.
<https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/pdfs/Spiegelman_Teachers_Guide.pdf>.
● Bauer, Yehuda. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. Print.
● Young, James E. (1998). The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman’s
“Maus” and the Afterimages of History. Critical Inquiry 2(3): 666–699. The University of
Chicago Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344086 (Accessedon: 19 April 2017).
● “What is a Camp?” The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings. Ed. Neil Levi and Michael
Rothberg. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003. 252-256. Representing the
Holocaust. Web. 16 July 2017. <https://representingtheholocaust.wikispaces.com/
file/view/Agamben_What+is+camp%3F.pdf>.