One of my best friends took this photo during a rehearsal this past summer. When I see it, the photo reminds me of my passion, my lifelong friends, my most rewarding life experiences, and my family both back at home and wherever my life will take me.
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.
I found that the beginning of the collaborative project was chaotic. After freaking out for about ten minutes, the class began settling down and organizing how we wanted to write the essay. We used the chat box to split the topics of the response to the prompt. It was difficult to organize certain people into certain groups as well as allowing others to edit and delete sentences, words, and thoughts. Luckily, we were all writing on this Googledoc in the same room; and, thus we could communicate efficiently. I fear that with a large group of writers not working in the same location I would feel overwhelmed and unorganized. I feel that the uncertainty of when and how others on the same Googledoc will edit my words. When I write an essay I need to reread the sentences in order to clarify and understand what I want to convey to my reader; but, when someone else deletes the sentence before I have completed my thought or clarification, I lose my argument entirely. I do believe that collaboratively working on an essay is a valid idea and will work as an advantage to improving my writing abilities, but I believe the non personal collaboration is not worth the energy and irritation I would feel in trying to convey what I want through the computer rather than face-to-face. I also argue that I approached this project with a negative bias; and, therefore did not open my mind to the advantages of working online with others, especially the sufficiency and speed that we would accomplish.
Before our in-class endeavor, I had never worked on a collaborative document. I have worked on papers in groups, but actually working and writing with other people at the same time was a unique experience. At first, I was a little too excited about the animal icons, the anonymous typing, and the small amount of “lag” that accompanied everyone’s ideas. I feel like I didn’t contribute as much as some of the other participants, but I threw in my 2 cents! It was extremely obvious during this whole process that some students were really engaged and enthralled, while others were withdrawn and distracted. Since we were working simultaneously, I feel that this didn’t take away much from the progression of our ideas. It made the process a little less stressful. I feel like there were times of frustration for every person–I, for example, eventually got annoyed with people deleting words and just stopped working and left the document for a time. However, by the end of the 45 minute adventure (after I rejoined the document), I felt like my entire class had written page after page of ideas and knowledgeable statements. Ultimately, I enjoyed the experience–I would happily do it again!
The collaborative essay done in class was definitely a new writing experience for me as well as many of my classmates. At first something new is always difficult and confusing, which was shown by the complete disarray in the first minutes of the assignment. The issues that we had arose from mostly organizational issues. There were many people writing similar ideas in different places of the google doc and this created a very informal “essay,” that was essentially just a list of ideas. As the assignment progressed, utilizing the group chat function, we were able to start to properly organize the ideas that we were writing. I believe that the use of google docs could be very a huge part of this class, especially with the new domain of one’s own program.
I had a very interesting result using the Google doc collaborative essay. In my opinion, it is a very useful tool that can help a group of people share their ideas in real time instead of taking the longer option by email. That being said, it can also be a very bad tool as well. In order to have a good essay everyone must work together and share ideas while letting people write one at a time. When everyone was writing at the same time it made a giant mess of words and it was very unorganized. I began writing down my ideas one by one and it was starting to look more like a paragraph, rather than a mess of words. While we were working I felt like I always had to make sure someone wasn’t writing the same ideas as me. That was definitely one thing that I didn’t like about the collaborative essay. I would much rather write an essay on my own, while being able to share ideas with my classmates and gain knowledge from them. I also noticed that my classmates were much more involved with the ideas that I had to talk about, which I really liked. It made me feel like I was a part of a bigger production.
In class on Tuesday we did a collaborative writing project utilizing google docs in which all the members of the class endeavored to write one essay about a certain prompt regarding Maus. For me this was a very stressful experience. I am a pretty independent person and watching some anonymous mouse delete something I had just written was infuriating. It was also pretty confusing trying to keep track of all almost twenty mice that were all moving and editing and typing. One thing that was interesting to me was just the drastic differences in writing styles and the way that different people portray their thoughts. Throughout my life I have written a lot of essays but a teacher has always graded them so I don’t have much experience reading other students essays and it was very cool to me to see just how differently people write. I think that the different writing styles were what created the biggest problems for us essay wise because I feel that it made the product pretty incohesive and disjointed. Overall I thought that it was a good experience and I’m sure that with a little more time, and a little more practice we could create a good cohesive product.
The collaborative essay writing assignment that the class had done in class was a brand new, yet very interesting experience. At the beginning of class we were told that we all had to contribute and write a single essay in 45 minutes. At that moment, every student was quite bewildered, as nobody really knew where to start. Students began jotting down random ideas that he or she had pertaining to the essay question. For the first 15-20 minutes, it was a mess. Cursors were everywhere, texts were being deleted, and good ideas were not put to use. Nobody kept track of what other people were writing and so there was a lot of redundancy as well. It wasn’t until Professor Morgen posted a series of questions on the document when the collaborative experience began to get more organized. Once the questions were posted, students were able to focus on specific ideas, which led to better team-work. Because everyone had a certain question to answer, it was much easier for students to add onto other students’ work and actually work “collaboratively.” I think that by the end of class, we definitely took steps in the right direction, but we still need to figure out a way to take all of the ideas and answers to the questions and put it into an essay form. I look forward to working on this again in class and truly believe it will be a success.
Working on the collaborative assignment was definitely a great way for people to share their opinions but most importantly it allowed us to build on the ideas of others. For instance while deciding what to write I noticed that someone wrote that Spiegelman uses self –reference in the illustrative depiction of his characters. Building on this idea: the appearances of his comical characters illustrate not only who they are but also where they’re from and the time period in which they live in. Art Spiegelman draws his characters in such a way that allows him to honestly tell his father’s story, without physically experiencing the holocaust himself. For example, in chapter 2 “ Auschwitz (Time Flies) of Maus II spiegelman is depicting a present scene were he draws himself as a man wearing a mask, being interviewed by reports of different racial backgrounds. The reporters around him are drawn as men wearing other different animal masks, denoting not only their racial backgrounds but also signifying that they where not apart of the past historical events, Spiegelmen introduces. In contrast to the characters without masks he portrays in his ‘past’ panels, which show the people who took part in the holocaust and Nazi Europe. The visual representation that Spieglemen uses to symbolize his own character in the story sets him apart from those who were actually present during the holocaust and the events the took place during war.
The essay that we worked on in class on Tuesday was the first experience I have had with collaborative writing. When we were first told to simply “go”, the class seemed to go into a bit of disarray. The googledoc had 20-something mice going in all different directions, there were different questions being answered in different parts of the document, and the situation seemed overall chaotic. In the beginning, it seemed as if each person essentially found a spot on the document and just went to work on some idea or question. This made it impossible for our essay to have any sense of cohesiveness. After the first 10 minutes of utter confusion, we began to discuss with one another what strategies would help make this seemingly impossible task possible. Professor Morgen had posed 4 or 5 separate questions so we began to delegate which people would or wanted to answer each individual question. Then, each person essentially found a secure spot on the document where they could write freely without interruption of one of the other mice. After about 20 minutes, we had about 5 pages of solid, concrete, valid responses to the questions Professor Morgen had posed. I believe our next step if we had more time would be to collectively organize our document into a somewhat cohesive answer to the questions asked. Overall, I thought the collaborative writing assignment was interesting and that with more practice we could actually create something of value.
