Artful Breakdowns

Georgiana Banita is associate professor of North American literature and culture at University of Bamberg. She is author of Plotting Justice: Narrative Ethics and Literary Culture after 9/11 and coeditor of Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice. Lee Konstantinou is associate professor of English literature at University of Maryland, College Park. He is author of the novel Pop Apocalypse and the literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction, and coediter of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace.

This collection of 13 essays explores the life and work of Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir Maus. . . . Following a biographical essay, the book is divided into four sections: "Modernism and Form", "Radical Politics," "Mediating Memory," and "Comics History." Among the standout contributions, Georgiana Banita looks at Spiegelman's use of wordless comics to reflect modem art's habit of frustrating an audience's access to the past. Kent Worcester examines Spiegelman's 9/11 art in the context of a left-wing man who lived within blocks of the Twin Towers and had antipathy toward both jihadists and the Bush administration. Sarah Hamblin reviews RAW, a pivotal publ1ication that set off the alternative comics culture of the 1980s. Harriet Earle considers Maus alongside Holocaust films, and Cara Koehler sets Sp1i1egelman"s work within the history of immigration comics. . . . Highly recommended.--C. E. Neumann "CHOICE" While critical attention to Spiegelman has been extensive, it has also been extremely narrow, with the vast bulk of the critical literature focusing all or in part on Maus. Artful Breakdowns will be the definitive word on Spiegelman's entire career as artist, editor, and public intellectual.--Joseph Witek, professor of creative arts at Stetson University