Daniel Mendelsohn and The Lost

For our final book of the term, we'll look at yet another text that rewrites and reimagines history, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Not just another Holocaust memoir, Mendelsohn's book searches for the history of his lost family members at the same time that it suggests the difficulties attendant to representing rupture and violence. Like both Maus and Lose Your Mother, The Lost is situated at the crossroads of memoir, historiography, and literary fiction. How does Mendelsohn's circuitous narrative strategies affect our reading of the text? What do these strategies say about the possibility of getting at the heart of meaning and narrative after the Holocaust?

Born in 1960, Mendelsohn has long been a prominent literary and cultural critic. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton, and has written for the New York Review of Books for a number of years. He has also published a wide array of books, from a memoir about family and sexual identity, entitled The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, a collection of his essays on literature and the arts, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, and a two-volume translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy.

Art Spiegelman and Maus

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.




How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story

Philip Roth and the Plot Against America

Philip Roth is one of America's most prolific and successful authors. Many critics have marked him as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point during the coming years (a fact of which he seems very aware!). When the New York Times asked hundreds of the most prominent critics, writers, and editors to pick the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years, six of Roth's novels made the top spot repeatedly. The essay accompanying the results of this survey stated that "[i]f we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

Roth was born in 1933 and grew up near Newark, NJ--much like the protagonists of The Plot Against America and many other Roth novels. He was recognized at a young age, publishing Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (when he was just 26). After receiving the National Book Award for this volume in 1960, he went on to publish a number of other texts that form the fundament of postwar American literary fiction. From 1969's Portnoy's Complaint to 1979's The Ghost Writer to more recent works, such as American Pastoral (1998), The Plot Against America (2004), and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has managed to write books richly evocative of the era in which he and his readers live. The book we'll be reading in class--The Plot Against America--is one of Roth's more recent, but it manifests many of the themes that have preoccupied the author since the beginning of his career. Following in the footsteps of Roth's "American trilogy" (American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain being the triumvirate), The Plot Against America marks the development of a historically-conscious and socially- panoramic Roth. The novel is both speculative history and playful metafiction, simultaneously undergirding and subverting our ideas about the links between history and fiction. How does Roth's novel and its relationship to historical revision compare to the neo-slave narratives we've read in class? To Kushner or Doctorow? Less formally experimental than Doctorow, Roth is nonetheless interested in the ways in which the history of postwar America continues to haunt the present.