The Visualization Of The Invisible In Maus

In a more complex visually and textually oriented public-commercial world (cinema,television,online reviews),traditional novelists and publishers are far less monopolistic in their cultural status and increasingly interact with the visual world.Many cartoonists and visual works have gained renewed attention,especially the graphic novels in the literary world.The term "graphic novel"was first coined by Will Einser in hopes of promoting comics to serious works and general readership.The perception of comic books and the graphic novel in the literary world has been revolutionized by the phenomenal success of Art Spiegelman's Maus,which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992.Maus is essentially a biography of Vladek's survival in the Holocaust,recorded by his son Art Spiegelman in a graphic form.Based on the true history,Maus also serves as a testimony and deals with racial,ethical,and familial issues,in which identity is notably visualized to the metaphor of animals:mice,cats,pigs,dogs representing Jews,Germans,Poles,and Americans respectively.Maus's expansive visual-verbal grammar offers greater narrative capabilities for conceptions,temporality and space,rhetorical devices,and drawing psychology,which are often posited at a minor place at most studies in this field.They are invisible and highly unrepresentable in traditional novels,due to their comparably lower visual capacity than images.In this thesis,a series of analytical frames will be elaborated,to present how Spiegelman visualizes the invisible in Maus as a narrative strategy.The thesis consists of the introduction,five chapters and the conclusion.The introduction provides a background information about the visual culture,the public status of graphic novels,and a brief introduction of Maus and its author Art Spiegelman.Besides,the reasons and significance of this study are also included in this part together with the current studies on Maus.Chapter One concentrates on the definitions of "Graphic Novel" and "Visualization" as a narrative strategy in a graphic novel and the invisible visualized in Maus will be identified,based on the definition of "invisible".Chapter Two explores the visual metaphor as a rhetorical device in Maus,including animal allegory,masks on human's faces and the implied meanings of mouse's "Tail/Tale".Chapter Three illustrates how the invisible elements "silence"and "absence" are presented from the perspective of visualization.Chapter Four analyzes how postmemory of Art,as the child of Holocaust survivors,is visualized in the graphic form.Chapter Five applies the drawing psychology as a perspective to probe into the unconsciousness of Spiegelman's creation,where Spiegelman as a character Art/Artie in Maus transfers to the author of it.His psychological states and inference to Vladek's narration become visible in this visual form.This thesis provides an analysis of a double perspective(textual and visual—visible and invisible—conscious and unconscious)for the readers,a perspective of the narrator and chronicler through which an individual graphic novel can be newly understood.Moreover,it is hoped to serve as a reminder for the readers that the narrative in graphic form is also of great significance,in which words and images are believed to be as a half of a completed graphic story respectively.The visual-verbal ability in Maus works to solve the narrative problems,deal with profound themes and complex issues to create a great story.