This Is Your Life and Photography in MAUS

In class on Wednesday, we watched a clip from the following This Is Your Life episode to open up discussion about the disjuncture between American and European experiences of the Holocaust, as well as 1950s America's awkward attempts to integrate genocide into technicolor television culture.

The full video is below for those interested. Take a look and comment if the spirit takes you.



Also: We didn't get a chance to finish talking about the last pages of MAUS. How dos the introduction of photographs in the last pages of Book II affect our reading of the text? How does the photograph compare to comix as visual media? Is Maus a text appropriately read as a piece of documentary, a remnant of a survivor's experience or something else? Also notice the ways in which the Spiegelman plays with the photograph as another object on the comix page. The many photographs of the Spiegelman family dead are piled atop one another as if they are dead bodies piled inside the gates of (M)Auschwitz and his father's photograph is a play on the many other meta-biographical elements of the book (the souvenir photo of Vladek is a fake, but a fake of something that really happened).