The Holocaust - A Literary Inspiration?: Illustrating the Shoah as a Comic Strip in Art Spiegelman's MAUS

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Jewish American Literature, language: English, abstract: In the following paper I would like to examine to what extent the Holocaust is appropriate as a literary inspiration. I will cite Art Spiegelman’s comic strips MAUS I and MAUS II (with focus on the latter) as examples since they are two of the most extraordinary works among Holocaust literature and art.

In general I want to demonstrate that Adorno’s thesis about the impossibility of writing about the Holocaust is not true. By giving the example of Spiegelman’s MAUS it should be made clear that it is even possible to use the Holocaust as some kind of inspiration in a fairly unusual way.