Reading Art Spiegelman

<p>The horror of the Holocaust lies not only in its brutality but in its scale and logistics; it depended upon the machinery and logic of a rational industrialised and empirically organised modern society. The central thesis of this book is that Art Spiegelman’s comics all identify deeply-rooted madness in post-Enlightenment society. Spiegelman maintains in other words that the Holocaust was not an aberration but an inevitable consequence of modernisation. In service of this argument Smith offers a reading of Spiegelman’s comics with a particular focus on his three main collections: <i>Breakdowns </i>(1977 and 2008)<i> Maus </i>(1980 and 1991) and <i>In the Shadow of No Towers </i>(2004)<i>.</i> He draws upon a taxonomy of terms from comic book scholarship attempts to theorize madness (including literary portrayals of trauma) and critical works on Holocaust literature. </p>