Length: 1000-1500 words
Format: MLA.
Submission format: Save as a single PDF and post it within the correct assignment folder under Assessments on
our Brightspace course site.
Please note: You are absolutely forbidden to use generative AI technology such as but not limited to
ChatGPT for any portion of this assignment. Meet or exceed expectations for academic integrity in this
critique.
Instructions:
Respond to the question in a well-informed and carefully developed critique that quotes well from one of the scholarly sources listed. I will assess your work on content, organization, style, and mechanics. Please develop one Works Cited at the end of your document; in it, list all sources and sites you consulted, including the scholarly source you choose from the list below. Because this assignment is reflective in nature you are welcome to use the first person, but do so consciously and without letting it become too wordy.
Your task: 20 marks
Wilfred Guerin argues that “literature is primarily art, [and] art does not exist in a vacuum. It is a creation by someone at some time in history, and it is intended to speak to other human beings about some idea or issue that has human relevance.” Choose at least three different tellers and/or writers of story that appear in Maus. For each of these three, identify their historical context, and identify their specific and different “idea or issue that has human relevance.” How is the message of each teller shaped by: their historical context; their own creative process; and also by their choice of listener/reader? In a well-informed and carefully developed researched reflective critique that quotes from Spiegelman and also from one of the scholarly articles listed below, discuss what you learned about the way historical context and creative process can affect each other in a complex literary work such as Maus: A Survivor’s Tale; and, in one or two additional well-developed paragraphs incorporated into the critique, explain what you yourself learned about “Telling Stories” through the long process of completing this Researched Reflective Critique. Your critique must account for the graphic narrative format of Spiegelman’s books.
Budick, Emily Miller. “Forced Confessions: Subject Position, Framing, and the “Art” of Spiegelman’s Maus.”
The Subject of Holocaust Fiction. Indiana UP, 2015, pp. 70-99. Memorial University Libraries. Nov. 28.
2023.
Kolar, Stanislav. “Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Spiegelman’s Maus.” Brno Studies in English,
vol. 39., no. 1, pp. 227-241. Memorial University Libraries, Nov. 28, 2023, DOI: 10.5817/BSE2013-1-
13.
Morris, Janice. “Of Mice and Men: Collaboration, Postmemory and Working Through in Art Spiegelman’s
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale.” Graphic History: Essays on Graphic Novels And/As History. Richard
Iadonisi, ed. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Memorial University Libraries, Nov. 25, 2023.
Urdiales-Shaw, Martin. “Between Transmission and Translation: The Rearticulation of Vladek Spiegelman’s
Languages in Maus.” Translation and Literature Vol. 24, no. 1, 2015, pp. 23-41. Memorial University
Libraries, Nov. 25, 2023, http://www.jstor.org.stable/24585388.
Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. “Art Spiegelman’s Graphic Memoir Maus: ‘One is Left with What Remains, the Ruins
That Are Sifted Over Endlessly.” Picturing Identity: Contemporary American Autobiography in Image
and Text. U North Carolina P, 2018, pp. 83-111. Memorial University Libraries, Nov. 23, 2023.
