A Journey Through Hell
In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri conceived of the Inferno as a physical landscape which could be mapped and navigated through. In so doing, he helped created the language and imagery which modern-day writers and artists often turn to when describing Hell. It also created a shared reference poin...
| Autores: | , |
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| Tipo de recurso: | artículo |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2018 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona |
| Repositorio: | Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:ddd.uab.cat:200669 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://ddd.uab.cat/record/200669 https://dx.doi.org/urn:doi:10.5565/rev/dea.105 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Dante Divine comedy Inferno Spiegelman Maus Holocaust Shoah Divina Commedia Olocausto |
| Sumario: | In The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri conceived of the Inferno as a physical landscape which could be mapped and navigated through. In so doing, he helped created the language and imagery which modern-day writers and artists often turn to when describing Hell. It also created a shared reference point for discussion of horrific events such as the Holocaust/Shoah. For example, in Survival in Auschwitz (1959), Primo Levi turned to Dante's Inferno to make sense of his experiences in the concentration camps. In this paper we suggest that comic book artist Art Spiegelman utilised the imagery and lexicon of the Inferno to create Maus, a two volume biography of his father Vladek Spiegelman, a former inmate of Auschwitz and Holocaust survivor. We posit that there are four key ways in which Spiegelman draws inspiration from Dante's epic work. The first is the stylistic form which Dante and Spiegelman chose to tell their monumental stories. The second is Spiegelman's authorial decision to locate himself in Maus as both narrator and a character. We then consider how Maus explores huge themes of life such as survival and historical memory through complex father-son relationships. Finally, we contend that Spiegelman borrows extensively from Dante's depiction of the physical landscape of Hell to visualise the horrors of life at Auschwitz.Spiegelman utilises structural and thematic elements of Inferno to help explain the tortured relationship he had with his parents, especially the effects on him of his mother's suicide, as well as the difficulties of recording history, particularly an event as immense and traumatic as the Holocaust. |
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