SOURCE: Charlson, Joshua L. “Framing the Past: Postmodernism and the Making of Reflective Memory in Art Spiegelman's Maus.” Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 3 (autumn 2001): 91-120.

In the following essay, Charlson asserts that Maus successfully rejects genre categorization, putting into question the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, history and memory, and testimony and imagination.

The impossibility of telling the story, the impossibility of recapturing the historical reality, becomes not only the essential force of Jewish writing today, but the aesthetic formula for all fiction today.

Raymond Federman

When Art Spiegelman's Maus II: A Survivor's Tale (1991)—the second volume of his Pulitzer prize-winning account, in comic-book format, of his family's persecution during the Holocaust¹—made it on to the New York Times' best-seller list, the editors initially placed the work on the fiction side of the ledger.² They believed, apparently, that a work written in comic-strip style, with humans depicted as...