Art Spiegelman
February 18–19, 2008
- Discussion: Streaming video, MP3 audio
- Photos from Spiegelman's visit.
- 2008 Fellows seminar notes
February 19 Discussion
Listen to the whole discussion, moderated by Al Filreis MP3
- disaster as a muse MP3
- on Maus MP3
- representations of the Holocaust after September 11 MP3
- on Breakdown MP3
- Spiegelman's relationship with his son MP3
- Spiegleman's own profit from using September 11 MP3
- government subsidies for artists MP3
- compression in the graphic novel MP3
- harnessing creative ideas MP3
- hiatus before No Towers MP3
- Spiegleman reads from the first paragraph of No Towers MP3
- identification with Jewish-American culture MP3
- working at The New Yorker MP3
- absence after September 11 MP3
- active participation of the reader MP3
- Spiegelman reads from the end of No Towers MP3
Bio
Art Spiegelman has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Holocaust narrative Maus, which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the story of his parents' survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, their formal complexity, and controversial content. Spiegelman believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise. "Comics echo the way the brain works," he says.
Spiegelman was a staff artist and writer at The New Yorker from 1993 to 2003. He has published the Little Lit series and other comics anthologies for children. In 2004 he completed a two-year cycle of broadsheet-sized color comics pages, In the Shadow of No Towers, which was selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the year's 100 Notable Books. In 2005, Spiegelman was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. The Los Angeles Times has written that Spiegelman's illustrations "are meant not just to be plainly understood but also to reach up and tattoo your eyeballs with images once unimaginable ... Art Spiegelman's cartoons don't fool around."
Photos
