Out of Kansas :: Personal Narrative Papers

Out of Kansas I find it on the gamey bookshelfMaus A Survivors Tale. Ive heard about it. Its about the Holocaust. Mice play the Jews, and cats play the German Nazis. I understand it already. Cats argon predators to mice. Thats easy enough. I st art reading. The Polish people be pigs. Wait a minute, I dont get it. why are they pigs? Im getting confused. I want to relieve sensationself up. Instead, I pick it up and start again.We begin as dogged troubleshooters we see a puzzle piece that doesnt fitwe all chop off a corner or throw the matter away. What is a stereotype besides a way of grouping things in order to understand them in a complete and perfectly organised way? To say that something didnt fit would be an admission that we are unsure of the world we are living ina excite public opinion. Further, we are often conditioned through art to recognize these stereotypes without thought and to react identically as a communitya style of creating and controlling an ideal society. Theater theorist and playwright Bertolt Brecht says of European theater, It is salubrious known that contact between audience and stage is normally make on the basis of empathy (136). The intention is often to make audiences identify with the characters and the stories so that they will reach a natural state of controlled catharsis at the end. Many audiences have thus learned to expect and enjoy such(prenominal) a style.Audiences seek art that will pick them up and collect them along for the entire ride. Underground comic, illustrator, and magazine editor Art Spiegelman meets that propensity in his novel-sized comic Maus. Spiegelman describes his work The goal was to get people travel forward, to get my eye and thought organized enough so that one could relatively, seamlessly, be able to become absorbed in the narrative (Jun 10). A story that absorbs the audience into its own unslowing whirlwind sounds a lot like Brechts description of the cathartic theater of control. However, Spiegelmans works havent always had the same goal. In his early career, the question that motivated his art was, How many obstacles could you put in somebodys path forward the reader just caved in and couldnt handle it anymore? (Juno, 8). The goal was to stilt catharsisto kill it in its tracks in order to resurrect active thought. I read his 1972 comic strip Skinless Perkins.