When Pulitzer-prize winning Art Spiegelman discusses the making of his film "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" today, he will explain the unconventional methods he used in addressing one of the most profound tragedies of the modern age: the Holocaust.
Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
The discussion, which will take place in Cook Auditorium at 7:30 p.m., centers upon the book, which uses a cartoon narrative as a medium in which the Germans are cats, Jews are mice and every ethnic group from Americans to French are portryed as different animals.
The New York Times Book Review called the book "a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness ... an unfolding literary event."
The book works on two levels -- the oral level made of the father's testimony and translated into cartoon bubbles and the visual level of Spiegelman's remarkable graphics.
"Maus" moves back and forth from Poland to Rego Park, New York. The first part -- "My Father Bleeds History" -- deals with Spigelman's father's harrowing experiences in Hitler's Europe, comprised of stories involvbing imprisonment, betrayal and escape.
The second part examines Spiegelman's life with his father and the way they attempt to live a normal life in the face of horrifying memories which time can never erase.
French and Italian Professor Marianne Hirsch and History Professor Leo Spitzer invited Spiegelman to speak at Dartmouth. The two teach an interdisciplinary course titled Comparative Literature 94: Representing the Holocaust: History, Memory and Survival.
Hirsch said in a press release, "Art Spiegelman's Maus is a central text in our course... In the vast body of Holocaust literary and visual representation, no one has been able to raise, as well as Spiegelman, the complexity of representing this historical event."
The representation of these characters have been controversial, Hirsch said.
Spitzer wrote, "Maus juxtaposes personal and global history in a visual medium -- the comic strip -- that permits us to view past and present simultaneously. It thus illuminates the past while uncovering its effects on the next generation. For every individual interested and affected by the Holocaust -- the defining moment of the twentieth century -- this double perspective constitutes history at its best."
Hirsch said, "Survivors of the Holocaust are rapidly leaving our midst. It will be up to all of us, the children and grandchildren of that generation, to try to tell their story. Maus prepares us for the difficulties we will encounter [when we] try to represent the unrepresentable."
Spiegelman is editor of Raw, a magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. He has published works in the New York Times, the Village Voice, the New Yorker and other periodicals. His drawings have been exhibited in museums worldwide.
For his work on "Maus," he received a Guggenheim fellowship and a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
