ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
Contemporary Literature 5 Post War 56 Views
Share It!
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.
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
Full Transcript
- 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
Up Next
They say that honesty is the best policy, but Jack lies about his identity and still gets the girl. Does that mean we should all lie to get what we...
Related Videos
Ever wish you could remember everything that you ever studied? How about everything that everyone has ever studied? Yeah, pretty sure our brains ju...
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an American classic. Hope you're not expecting any exciting shower scenes though. It's not that kind of book.
Do not go gentle into that good night. In fact, if it's past your curfew, don't go at all into that good night. You just stay in your good bed and...