Maus Now - Selected Writing

Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman’s Maus (“the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” —The Wall Street Journal), Maus Now includes work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and academics—including Philip Pullman, Robert Storr, Ruth Franklin, and Adam Gopnik—on the radical achievement and innovation of Maus, more than forty years since the original publication of “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker).

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it’s hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district’s English language-arts curriculum demonstrates.

Maus Now: Selected Writing collects responses to Spiegelman’s monumental work that confirm its unique and terrain-shifting status. The writers approach Maus from a wide range of viewpoints and traditions, inspired by the material’s complexity across four decades, from 1985 to 2018. The book is organized into three loosely chronological sections— “Contexts,” “Problems of Representation,” and “Legacy”—and offers for the first time translations of important French, Hebrew, and German essays on Maus.

Maus is revelatory and generative in profound and long-lasting ways. With this collection, American literary scholar Hillary Chute, an expert on comics and graphic narratives, assembles the world’s best writing on this classic work of graphic testimony.

Contexts
Philip Pullman Behind the Masks (2003)
Joshua Brown Of Mice and Memory (1988)
Ken Tucker Cats, Mice, and History: The Avant-Garde of the Comic Strip (1985)
Adam Gopnik Comics and Catastrophe: Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the History of the Cartoon (1987)
Kurt Scheel Mauschwitz? Art Spiegelman’s “A Survivor’s Tale” (1989)
Dorit Abusch “The Holocaust in Comics?” (1997 and 2021)
Thomas Doherty Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust (1996 and 2020)
Stephen E. Tabachnick Of Maus and Memory: The Structure of Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Novel of the Holocaust (1993)
 
Problems of Representation
Marianne Hirsch My Travels with Maus, 1992–2020 (1992, 1997, 2012, and 2020) 
Nancy K. Miller Cartoons of the Self: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Murderer—Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1992)
Michael Rothberg “We Were Talking Jewish”: Art Spiegelman’s Maus as “Holocaust” Production (1994) 
Alan Rosen The Language of Survival: English as Metaphor in Spiegelman’s Maus (1995)
Terrence Des Pres Holocaust Laughter? (1988) 
Andreas Huyssen Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno (2003) 
 
Legacy
Robert Storr Making Maus (1991) 
Hillary Chute “The Shadow of a Past Time”: History and Graphic Representation in Maus (2006)
Ruth Franklin Art Spiegelman’s Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited (2011)
Pierre-Alban Delannoy Spiegelman, in Nobody’s Land (2009)
David Samuels Q&A with Art Spiegelman, Creator of Maus (2013)
Hans Kruschwitz Everything Depends on Images: Reflections on Language and Image in Spiegelman’s Maus (2018) 
Alisa Solomon The Haus of Maus: Art Spiegelman’s Twitchy Irreverence (2014)

Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Selected Further Writing on Maus 
Contributors