Graphic novel expert to give talk as part of common read events
KALAMAZOO, Mich.—An expert on graphic novels and comics will help put Western Michigan University's 2015-16 common-read book in perspective when she presents a public talk at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14, in the Bernhard Center's South Ballroom.
Dr. Hillary Chute, associate professor of English at the University of Chicago, will speak on "Understanding the Graphic Novel: Art Spiegelman's 'Maus' and Contemporary Comics."
The work selected for WMU's 2015-16 University Common Read is Spiegelman's "Maus I: A Survivor's Tale. Pantheon Books published the graphic novel, subtitled "My Father Bleeds History," in 1986. That press published the conclusion to the story in 1992 as "Maus II: A Survivor's Tale" under the subtitle, "And Here My Troubles Began."
Chute is associate editor of a book by Spiegelman called "MetaMaus," which explores the making of what Chute calls Spiegelman's "terrain-shifting" Maus graphic narrative, a narrative that in 1992 became the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.
In conjunction with this year's common read and related First-Year Experience activities, WMU has launched a campuswide comics project called Making History. WMU students with varying levels of artistic ability—from none to considerable—are engaging in Spiegelman's process of interview, transcription and comics creation to produce short nonfiction narratives. Those who submit their comics by Dec. 15 will have their work included in a published collection as well as have a chance to win prizes.
Hillary Chute
Hillary Chute is interested in the ways people address history and understand their lives through cultural invention. Her current teaching and research interests lie in contemporary American literature, specifically in how public and private histories take shape in the form of innovative narrative work.
Chute is particularly interested in the relationships between the words and images, and fiction and nonfiction that is seen in contemporary comics, a field she says has roots in the 1970s and also is connected to deeper histories of drawn reportage and visual witnessing.
Her latest book, "Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics and Documentary Form," is expected to be released by Harvard University Press in January. It looks at the post-World War II environment in which Art Spiegelman in America and Keiji Nakazawa in Japan concurrently developed comics as a form for addressing the fallout of war. Additionally, it explores current graphic reportage by figures such as cartoonist Joe Sacco, who has reported on the Balkans and the Middle East.
About the book
"Maus" is the story of Vladek Spiegelman—a Polish Jew who survived Hitler's Europe and Auschwitz—and his cartoonist son—the author—who tries to come to terms with Vladek, Vladek's terrifying story and history itself. The characters are drawn metaphorically as mice (Jews), cats (Germans), pigs (Poles), frogs (the French) and dogs (Americans).
It began as a three-page underground comic Spiegelman drew in 1972 based on interviews he did of his father. During the ensuing years, he continued the interviews as well as conducted meticulous research and turned the comic into a two-part graphic novel. The cartoonist serialized "Maus" from 1980 until 1991 as an insert in Raw, an avant-garde comics and graphics magazine published by Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly.
Individually and together, "Maus I" and "Maus II" have has won wide acclaim as a graphic narrative.
"A remarkable work, awesome in its conception and execution...," wrote the Oscar- and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, "at one and the same time a novel, a documentary, a memoir and a comic book. Brilliant, just brilliant."
The New Yorker magazine characterized the narrative as "the first masterpiece in comic book history." Meanwhile, the New York Times wrote that, "Its form, the cartoon, succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of a lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive."
For more information about WMU's 2015-16 University Common Read, visit libguides.wmich.edu/wmucommonread2015-16. Information about Making History may be accessed through that website or by visiting makinghistorycomicsorgblog.wordpress.com.