Abstract

This essay considers Maus as a work that spans the genres of autobiography and collaborative biography, as Art Spiegelman negotiates the difficulties of heteropathic identification—most successfully with his father Vladek, and more problematically with his mother Anja and brother Richieu. In analyzing the ways that Spiegelman struggles to narrate an identity within a family for whose founding trauma he was absent, the essay also investigates the ways that he seeks to intervene in public debates on visual art of the Holocaust.

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