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Contemporary Literature 5 Post War 56 Views


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Description:

What are the characteristics of post-war literature? What themes are explored in Maus ? Is Maus about mice? Does anyone else feel like cheese right about now? No? Just us? Cool. Cool, cool, cool. 

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English Language

Transcript

00:00

Thank you We sneak in contemporary literature postwar eyelash shmoop

00:10

what are the characteristics of postwar literature Post war american

00:14

literature is really characterized by a sense of confusion a

00:19

sense of loneliness and alienation Those are things that you

00:23

find in modernist literature after world war one but it's

00:27

really intensified after world war to because things are changing

00:31

even more quickly People start drying graphic novels and people

00:36

start experimenting with combining fiction and nonfiction so to great

00:40

examples are mouse by art spiegelman and the things they

00:44

carried by tim o'brien Mouse is and autobiographical graphic novel

00:52

where art spiegelman tries to tell the story of his

00:56

parents who were holocaust survivors It's a difficult story to

01:01

tell because they were so traumatized by it He's had

01:05

to spend his entire life just trying to get them

01:08

to tell the story So in order to deal with

01:11

that he goes meta So instead of trying to tell

01:15

the story from his parent's perspective he tells the story

01:18

from his perfected going to understand it and that just

01:21

gives you an overview both of the actual events but

01:25

also of how different people put those events together That's

01:29

like a very common technique in post nineteen forty five

01:32

literature because writers are so concerned with not only what

01:38

the truth is but if they're even can ever be

01:41

an objective sense of reality So mouse is devastating holocaust

01:48

story where all of the characters are portrayed by animals

01:53

So the jews are mice and the nazis are caps

01:58

as you might expect because they're pursuing the mice you

02:02

see concentration camps You see what happens to people before

02:07

during and after world war two Art spiegelman's parents do

02:11

survive the holocaust but their lives aren't happy And a

02:16

lot of what these books are concerned with is just

02:20

depicting the terrible toll that this type of persecution has

02:26

not just on the people who experience it but also

02:28

on their families and generations to come What are the

02:35

characteristics of postwar literature What themes are explored in mouse

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