Art Spiegleman’s Maus.

A Survivor’s Tale
Literature in English III
2022
 What: The content of memory
1. What are the memories rendered in the text?
How: Strategies used in the representation of memory
2. Characters: Discuss the animal metaphor. How can we explain it? How
does it contribute to the representation of memories?

The 3. Who narrates and/or perceives?

4. Is it possible to establish interrelations between characters and space?
What are the functions of space? Does it have a symbolic meaning?
Representation 5. Is it possible to observe metafictional strategies? How can we interpret
the use of metafiction from the angle of memory studies?
of Memory 6. What is the significance of the epigraph? What about the introductory
sequence?
  Trauma Studies
7. Does trauma theory in any way illuminate the
The analysis of the text?

Representation
of Memory
 1. Meet the author here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b4i0efaw1A
Does this interview, in any way, illuminate your reading of Maus?
How does the author relate to the Holocaust?

The
Representation
of Memory 2. Now watch Marianne Hirsh’s short introduction to postmemory
and take down key characteristics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0XdO1EEGdk

3. Can we, in any way, relate the use of metafiction to postmemory?

  Lieux de me'moire are simple and ambiguous, natural and artificial, at
once immediately available in concrete sensual experience and
Sites of susceptible to the most abstract elaboration. (18)
 Indeed, they are lieux in three senses of the word material, symbolic,
and functional. … the three aspects always coexist. Take, for example,
Memory the notion of a historical generation: it is material by its demographic
content and supposedly functional-since memories are crystallized and
transmitted from one generation to the next-but it is also symbolic,
(Nora) since it characterizes, by referring to events or experiences shared by a
small minority, a larger group that may not have participated in them.
(19)
 To begin with, there must be a will to remember. (19)
 The lieux we speak of, then, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound
intimately with life and death, with time and eternity(…). For if we
accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de me'moire is to
stop time, to block the work of forgetting, (…) it is also clear that lieux
de mkmoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an
endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of
their ramifications. (19)