"Maus Now": Spiegelman's Graphic Novel and the Present Tense with Hillary Chute

Art Spiegelman's Maus remains as poignantly relevant today as it was when it was first published serially beginning in 1980, and then in two book volumes in 1986 and 1991. Among many other reasons for Maus' present cultural impact, Hillary Chute argues that Spiegelman's comics narrative reveals the capacity of the medium as a form to register the persistence of history and to function as a mode of resistance to today's rising fascism. Chute's talk is in part drawn from her 2022 edited collection from Pantheon, Maus Now: Selected Writing. 

Hillary Chute is an American literary scholar and expert on comics and graphic narratives. She is Distinguished Professor of English and Art + Design at Northeastern University and the author or editor of seven titles on comics, including, most recently, her book, Why Comics? From Underground to Everywhere. She is a comics and graphic novels columnist for The New York Times Book Review.