
Contents
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Anti-Comics and the Modernist Artwork Anti-Comics and the Modernist Artwork
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Novocaine Dreams: The 1960s Novocaine Dreams: The 1960s
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Silent Screams: Breakdowns and Cover Art Silent Screams: Breakdowns and Cover Art
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Seven Types of Silence in Maus Seven Types of Silence in Maus
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Antiwar Art and the Wordless Novel Antiwar Art and the Wordless Novel
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Notes Notes
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The Modern Void: Art Spiegelman’s Aesthetics of Silence
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Published:March 2023
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Abstract
This chapter looks into how silence has supported Art Spiegelman's modernist project, from his early wordless cartoons and cover art to the multiple levels of speechlessness coursing through Maus and his late homage to woodcut artists of the interwar period. It focuses on the argument that Spiegelman enlists the artistry of wordless comics as a force against legibility, with the aim to counter an all-too-easy—and therefore potentially insincere or unearned—access to the past, be it personal or collective, and to the meaning of modernist art. To prove this point, the chapter addresses several broad developments in Spiegelman's career as well as engages individual works in detail, especially lesser-known art, as a way of furthering their reception. Moving across a chronological axis, the chapter first claims that Spiegelman's underground work is, “noisy with appeals for silence”; that it displays “a coquettish, even cheerful, nihilism,” which flouts formal expectations with no higher purpose than to simply disorient the reader and deride commercial comics. It also contends that with Maus, Spiegelman abandoned the contrived hilarity of his pantomimic cartoons to explore more varied wordless effects.
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