Traumatic Appropriation in Maus and In The Shadow of No Towers
Abstract
There are immense ethical concerns surrounding depicting another’s trauma and turning another’s trauma into a commodity for sale in the marketplace. Of these problems, competition and the denigration of the narratives of trauma sufferers are two of the most pervasive problems. Though comics are often considered low art – unfit for serious themes – through an examination of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers and Maus, this thesis explores how one can utilize structural qualities of comics to create a moral depiction of trauma by embracing intertextuality and duplicating the structures of trauma. Intertextuality can allow an artist to deploy the cultural capital of certain traumatic events towards the recognition of other traumatic events.
Description
Keywords
Literature--Comparative
Citation
Nolan, L. (2015). Traumatic Appropriation in Maus and In The Shadow of No Towers (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28520