Visualizing Literature: Book Club for Art Lovers
explores connections between the literary and visual arts through moderated book discussions and guided gallery tours led by experienced Joslyn docents. All book discussions begin in the Museum's Omaha Steaks Conference Room and conclude in the galleries where participants discover thematic links between the selected book and Joslyn's rich works of art on display. In addition to special guests from The Nebraska Medical Center's Health and Wellness Club, everyone is welcome to participate in this stimulating program.
Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1992) by Art Spiegelman.
Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus introduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler’s Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father’s terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.
This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek’s harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor’s tale—and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.
Would you rather come during the day? A morning session of Visualizing Literature is scheduled for Tuesday, November 11 at 10:30 am. Join us!
Presented in partnership with The Nebraska Medical Center's Health and Wellness Club,
Visualizing Literature is open to anyone interested in art and literature. Book discussions are free to Joslyn Members and members of The Nebraska Medical Center's Health and Wellness Club; the general public may attend for $5. No reservations are required. Books may be available for purchase in Joslyn's Hitchcock Museum Shop. For details, please contact Joslyn's Director of Adult Programs at (402) 661.3862 or sseverson@joslyn.org.
Come back next spring on Tuesday, March 10 or Thursday, March 12 for a look at the novel
Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock by Henry Adams. Books may be purchased from Joslyn's Hitchcock Museum Shop.