It took a while but we finally did it. Check out the comic that Wyatt, Chuck, David, and I created here.
Author Archives: Alex
Finished
I finished my Vietnamerica essay! Check it out here.
Is Vietnamerica a Bildungsroman?
Let me preface this post by saying I finished Vietnamerica last night and am extremely confused when it comes to some of the story lines, characters, or events. With some class discussion and re-reading I am pretty confident that I will get a better grasp on this book.
Originally, I would probably say that this is not a bildungsroman. Throughout the story, GB continually neglects his family’s history and his distant relatives. For example, despite living in the same city as his sister Lisa, he spends a very limited amount of time with her. Further, he even explicitly says at one point he embodies generational change in his family through his total disinterest in family history. This attitude takes a sharp turn right on the last page of the book though.
GB is on the phone with his Mom and she is telling him that he needs to go visit his family. He responds by saying that he is too busy worrying about making rent and he cannot afford to be bothered by annoyances such as making a trip to Vietnam, and hangs up the phone. Then, as he is going through some old boxes, he finds a book, “The Vietnam War”, that his father gave him when he was younger. He called his mom right back and asked if he could go to Vietnam with her. This is a very sudden change of heart but shows a true coming of age. He recognized the importance of his family’s past and the experiences that his parents and grandparents had gone through, and how those things cannot be forgotten, epitomizing a sign of maturity.
While many may argue that this is a family journal, rather than a single protagonist, and therefore cannot be considered a bildungsroman, I disagree and contend that GB is in fact the protagonist. Therefore, this can be a coming of age story.
Finished Project
I finally finished my Tracing Maus project. Check it out here.
Historians 2/28
This week, on Tuesday we spent a good bit of time discussing our Maus tracing project. A number of people had issues with their blogs so the first portion of class was somewhat devoted to discussing and troubleshooting those formatting issues. During the second portion of class we looked at, and dissected a HORRIBLE representation of a standard five paragraph essay. Key word: standard. We basically looked at and learned all of the reasons that the intro and conclusion are redundant and inherently unnecessary. On Thursday we spent the entirety of class discussing Fun Home and the patterns that we have noticed therein. One of the most important that we found mostly had to do with the dark humor and the way the all the other themes are kind of wrapped up in that.
An interesting thing that I read more about is the situation at the University of Charleston and USC. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/02/21/south-carolina-legislators-cut-university-funding-over-gay-themed-books/
This situation brings up lots of interesting points, specifically whether or not legislators have a place in regulating education.
Readers 2/10
Earlier in Maus II, we see Art have a hard time managing what he calls “survivor’s guilt”. He clearly admits a sense of guilt or sorrow for not having gone through the same tragedy that his father and other relatives had to go through. That idea comes into great contrast with Art’s actions during the last chapters of Maus II. In my opinion, somehow who actually feels such guilt, to the point that they must go to a psychiatrist like Art did, would spend as much time as possible trying to make it up to their father. Yet in Chapter 4, we repeatedly see Art acting selfishly, choosing to inconvenience his father over himself. For example, he refuses to move in with his father as in his opinion his father paying for an in house nurse is much better than inconveniencing his own life. Further, he changes the topic of conversation when Vladek asks him to install his windows, eventually saying that Vladek should “pay a bit more for heat for a few days longer” rather than inconvenience his son. Finally, rather than discuss issues that are actually relevant to Vladek’s life such as his deteriorating health or his relationship with Mala, Art prefers to discuss the events of the Holocaust so that he can finish his book. This battle between guilt and selfishness really caught my attention because it is hard to believe he feels so guilty, which it seemed he did during the psychiatrist scenes, when he comes back and acts so unconcerned towards his father.
In chapter five of Maus II, we see a profound change in the direction of the “emotions” the author is trying to illicit. Art Spiegelman adds an actual image of Vladek adorned in the striped garments that the holocaust is known for. Previously in the graphic novel all the Jews were depicted as similar looking mice, with barely any distinguishable features. The addition of this image gives the reader a much more intimate relationship to the graphic novel and to Vladek as an individual. This contrasts the previous relationship with an anonymous mass of people indistinguishable from one another. Throughout the graphic novel we have pictured the pain and suffering experienced by Vladek, but as a mouse. Now that we have seen an actual image we can associate the pain and suffering with a human face. This is because we can empathize more easily with a human than with a mouse.
