Literature in English, North America Commons^™

Visualizing Hate: Maus As Holocaust Literature, Geoffrey Daniel Curran

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus affected traditional classifications of Holocaust writings, specifically literary memoir. Genre studies use Holocaust writings especially those classified as "literary memoirs", to define a narrow group to exclusion of texts like Maus. If Maus was not 'allowed' to be defined as memoir then was it solely cast as fiction? To view it as fictional would have denied that Maus was a graphic novel which interlaces both received testimonial 'truth' and receptive 'truth'.