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 Spiegelmans 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 Spiegelmans 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>