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Contact Info: bfinegan@ltu.edu

Major: Media Communication  
 

Journal 1:

 

1. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. A Grain of Wheat. 1967. Heinemann, 1986. Print.

     i. Summary: BookRags Summary

2. Spiegelman. Maus I. 1980. Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

     i. Summary: BookRags Summary

3. Spiegelman. Maus II: And Here My Troubles Began. 1991. Pantheon Books, 1991. Print.

     i. Summary: Shmoop Summary (scroll down for Maus II)

Journal 2: 

The piece I chose, Battle Scene by Lingelback in 1674, is just a generic battle scene between Christians and Turks, but it strongly suggests clashing culture in the context of religion. Religion in itself can cause major cultural collision between societies, especially in the 17^th century. Without developments in the science, societies relied on stories related to celestial experiences and religion. It helped societies explain the big questions regarding existence, and to question it was taken offensively, because it was all they really had at the time. Religion meant everything to certain cultures, and in many cultures it still does.

 

In a sense, I also chose this because it directly relates to the theme of the texts I chose initially. As you mentioned, the themes impending war are clear in this piece, along with the theme of oppression (more-so with Maus than A Grain of Wheat, I assume, though the theme could still be present). This piece is an incredible expression of how oppression of belief between cultures can lead to devastating wars for both sides.

Aesthetically, the piece seems to have lots of pending motion, especially with the mid-falling horse, the main subject of the piece. It’s also interesting that the subject horse in the piece is the brightest shade of white in the piece. Not only does it grab attention, but to me it also seems to represent the innocence of religious war. Everyone involved with religious disputes are all fighting for something divine, something that means a lot to them and their culture.  Religion teaches some people moral basis, and gives people hope for beyond our physical existence. Though the war is gruesome, they’re fighting for the hope and light religion provides them with.

(Piece is hyperlinked to title) 

Journal 3:  

 

The two elements of rhetoric that struck me the most about this piece were the human body element, and the color element.

 

I’ll start with color. The part of this piece that resonates with me the most is the utilization of white isolation. The clearest solider in the piece is the lightest, and to me, as I vaguely spoke about in my last journal, it symbolizes that they’re fighting for the same moral constructs. The purpose of religion for many, in my opinion, is to teach moral ground and how to be a good person. Moral ground is found in many different ways, but the teachings of many religious constructs is to teach the “path of the light,” if you will. The darkness of religious war is all based around finding a moral ground to lead them to the light and a peaceful afterlife. I think this piece is utilizing color to express the peaceful intentions of religious war.

The human body element was intriguing to me in the sense that it feels very chaotic. The utilization of lines (another element of rhetoric) across the human body is expressing the chaos of this battle (do you mean lines implied by the bodies or lines of bodies... I'd love to read more). All across the landscape, there is no one completely still. Everyone is mid motion, and it’s just intriguing how you can just feel the extensive motion throughout the piece just by the orientation of the human body. Nice observation!

 

Journal 4

 

The topic I’m considering for my final paper is cultural oppression and how it relates to works in class such as Maus I and II. However, instead of comparing and contrasting them to a visual piece, I’ll be comparing and contrasting them to an audial piece.

Shigeto’s 2010 album, “Lineage,” was written for his Grandmother. During Pearl Harbor, certain sectors within the US kept certain people of the Japanese race into “internment camps” to protect them from infiltration. Zach Shigeto Saginaw’s Grandmother fell victim to this.

The artist describes that this album was to show his grandmother that we now live in a world where we’re able to express our cultural heritage. The record celebrates it.

I’ll be using sources from interviews with Saginaw, along with audial rhetoric such as mood, tone, structure, and other direct elements of music theory. These techniques are used to create a certain aesthetic relative to its concept, and that aesthetic is what I want to analyze.

 

DIA Photo



Journal 5

Here are the texts I'm considering for secondary reference:

Breitman, Richard, David Bankier, and Hubert G. Locke. Holocaust and Genocide Studies. 2nd ed. Vol. 23. Oxford: Oxford UP in Association with the United States Holocaust Museum, 1996. Print.

Renteln, Alison Dundes. "A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Japanese American Internment." Human Rights Quarterly 17.4 (1995): n. pag. Web.

 

Faulkner, Matt. Gaijin: American Prisoner of War. Disney-Hyperion, 2014. Print.

(The last one I'm considering isn't a scholarly book by any means, but it's still something I want to reference in the final paper. It was a graphic novel published this year about what it was like being in American Internment camps after Pearl Harbor. It really fits the theme of my paper, and I think it'd be interesting to compare and contrast to the Maus books, which came out much earlier. The topics are so intertwined I had to include it.)

 

Journal 6

My working thesis: "Cultural oppression throughout history (Maus) still impacts the cultural collisions amongst humanity today (Lineage)."

My idea is to compare the oppression within Maus, and within the context of Saginaw's family, and show that through the art piece Lineage that it's effects still ripple out to the modern world. 

Journal 7
The graphic novel (Maus) helps create novelty of the events that transpired from the human perspective by caricaturing them into animals, something done similarly in “Animal Farm.” This characteristic makes the book way less personal. It’s similar to cartoons; the fact that all of these absurd and violent things happen in cartoons is because they’re not real. If Coyote dropped an anvil on a person, it’d make us feel guilty. If he drops it on a cartoon Roadrunner, it helps us trivialize that action. This is a great paragraph. Nice balance of text and analysis. 

 

What is the significance of this? Why do we need to trivialize the Holocaust? Is it trivial for Art? How does he illustrate his own struggle with cartooning his father's story? Does the cartoon help Art deal with it?

 

In The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote: "they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continous attrition, the breaking of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate victim in real life receive their beatings so that the spectators can accustom themselves to theirs.” (110) Writing just before the Holocaust, they argue that cartoon violence conditions the viewer to accept it in real life (Adorno dies in the Holocaust, I'm not sure about Horkheimer). I imagine that this is NOT what Spiegelman intends (but it's interesting). Do NOT feel you need to include this - just the first thing that came to mind when I read this passage. However, you may want outside research about violence in cartoons, to help support your point!

In a way, Maus is like the “Animal Farm” of graphic novels. Its social consciousness is much above any other graphic novel, even in today’s terms. However, if we were to create the story of Animal Farm with humans, we would feel much more guilty/enraged about the events that transpire in the book. Not only this, but honestly, we might get bored. I read Animal Farm at a young age, and comparing the entire situation to animals on a farm really helped me keep up with the events transpiring. Humanizing animals helps add entertainment value, as it does in cartoons. This paragraph seems to repeat the material above without furthering the argument. I would consider

 

 

Rough Draft:

[…]

The influence of the inhumane acts such as what Art’s father went through in Maus continue to resonate today, and nothing is a more clear indication of that than Zachary “Shigeto” Saginaw’s 2010 release, Lineage.
Saginaw is an Ann Arbor native artist, whose critically acclaimed debut “Full Circle” lead to a record deal with Ann Arbor native label Ghostly International Records; a label home to artists pivotal to the post hip-hop electronic scene that spawned in the late 2000’s. His roots in jazz and 90’s era hip-hop and intelligent dance music of an early Warp Records (now home to revolutionary artists such as Flying Lotus, Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada) creates an aesthetic that’s simultaneously serene, percussive, and at times, personal.
In 2010, at a height of the post hip-hop electronic scene (sometimes attributed to the LA producer Flying Lotus and his label collective, Brainfeeder), Shigeto released a concept album entitled “Lineage.” The concept of this album obviously lies within his heritage. However, as opposed to Art’s story, this piece expresses a disconnect from cultural heritage, as opposed to Art, who is the living product of the struggle.
On February 19^th, 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Rosevelt passed an executive order that granted the right for the government to take Japanese Americans from their homes and throw them into what they called “temporary assembly centers (Renteln 618),” some of which, early on, were converted from livestock pavilions into so called “concentration camps.”
These camps popped up all over the place, especially on the West coast. This includes Arizona, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and (most notably) Colorado, where we find a young Shigeto Ohmura, who was placed into the Amache Internment Camp in Granada, Colorado in 1943. This man would soon become Zachary Saginaw’s great grandfather, and his internment camp photo is printed on the back of the Lineage album. (Tabar)

After Truman signed the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act in 1948, almost all internment camps had closed. The effects, of which, were never truly reprimanded. 

As opposed to Art’s father, whom held the struggle and reality of surviving an internment camp over Art’s head, Zachary’s family, along with many Japanese Americans, as he describes, “suppressed their Japanese-ness.” 

“It’s an issue for me that I’m half Japanese and can’t speak the language,” Saginaw explains. “I could, if I invested the time in high school or something like that, but my grandmother, my mother; they wouldn’t speak it to me. (Tabar)”

This fear stems from the threat that their culture was implying for the American government at the time. These were terrible conditions for Japanese Americans, and the fear that derives from an experience like this one has a lasting effect, even on Saginaw, who is a generation further down the line from Art. As Art’s piece becomes a fear of exploitation, Saginaw describes his piece as a way of dealing with it, paying homage to the experience, and “letting [his] Grandma know that [he’s] affected by it (Tabar).

This homage creates endless similarities between the two pieces of work, but the distinction partially lies in their intentions. For Art, Maus (II especially) becomes a platform to deal with the issues, as it does with Saginaw. However, the constructs of the projects, to me, sit on entirely different responses to the issue.

At the start of chapter two of Maus II, Art battles with the idea of exploiting his father and the experiences his family went through by the acclaimed success of Maus I. Art desired to pay homage to his family, but the acclaim of turning the experiences of his deceased parents for a paycheck, so to speak, weighed on him, to the point it seems he wish he hadn’t. He created a successful expressive platform instantaneously with the work, and as we can see in chapter two of Maus II, we feel he starts to regret it.

For Saginaw, it seems the plain is completely different. Saginaw, who has been building his expressive platform for years, had an opportunity to celebrate the culture that his family was too afraid to. The use of rendered pentatonic scales, which throughout Japanese history has been referred to as the “Hirajōshi scale,” (Harich) becomes a way for Saginaw to build a record to celebrate his cultural heritage, it’s culture, along with the struggles his family went through. 

This is not to say that one pays homage more than the other. The similarities are striking, from the use of the actual concentration camp photo within the artwork of both pieces, to the generational disconnect between those who suffered and those who saw the effects of the suffering. 

What remains clear in both of these pieces is that the effects of this, whether it’s the immediate generation following or future generations to come, still resonates today within these cultures. Keep in mind; Saginaw’s piece came out in 2010. That’s only 4 years ago. The internment of Japanese Americans, including Shigeto Ohmura, happened almost 70 years prior to the release of this piece, and almost 50 years before Saginaw was even born. Yet, the compassion, dedication, and commitment to this issue, is clear within both of these pieces.

Though both pieces are describing a major issue, their execution remains similar by trivializing that pain, via their respective mediums.  

The medium of the graphic novel helps create novelty of the events that transpired from the human perspective by caricaturing them into animals, something done similarly in “Animal Farm.” This characteristic makes the book way less personal. It’s similar to cartoons; the fact that all of these absurd and violent things happen in cartoons is because they’re not real. 

Stephen Kirsh, a psychology professor at SUNY-Geneseo in New York explains:

“…Depictions of aggression, in the context of humor such acts are transformed from solemn and gruesome events into comical ones. In fact, the more the violence deviates from reality […], the less likely it is that the act of violence will be taken seriously by the viewer.” (Kirsh 2006)

In other words, if Coyote dropped an anvil on a human being, it’d make us feel guilty. If the Coyote drops it on a cartoon Roadrunner, it helps us trivialize that action.

In fact, back in 1974, a psychologist by the name of Robert Snow composed a study whereas children were subject to cartoons, live-action dramas, and footage of the Vietnam War. After the screenings, the children would be asked whether or not what they had watched contained violence. (Kirsh 2006) 

When the results were tallied, all of the children had identified the Vietnam War footage as violent, 70% identified that the live-action drama contained violence, and only 27% of 4-8 year olds (along with only 16% amongst 9-12 year olds) identified that the cartoon they were watching contained violence. As it happens, the cartoon exhibited to these children was none other than Roadrunner. (Snow 1974)

In the context of Maus, it’s hard for us to take these mice seriously. This isn’t discounting the effect of the graphic novel, but as the children prior couldn’t empathize with a cartoon bird subject to violence, it’s hard for us to empathize with these mice that are subject to violence as much as we would our fellow human being.

In the context of Lineage, Saginaw’s celebration of his culture, and the sonic pallet he provides to express that turns this positive into a negative. As Saginaw has built a following around Michigan and the rest of the world, his shows have become more populated, filled with a bright energy that almost masks the bleak darkness of this album’s concept.

Saginaw describes his music as “Bleak and dark, yet hopeful” (Tabar). That hopefulness that transcribes through chord structures rooted in late blues and early jazz (personal note: elaborate more, need a more distinct argument distinct argument, utilize Psychology of Music resource) is enough to create a masking tool similar to how Art uses mice as his tool of expression.

However, neither of these artists keeps their guard up in the entirety of their respective pieces. In the context of Art, the depictions of the human male figure in Maus II seem to humanize these events. You see the true human shape while they’re all using the communal shower, along with male genitalia. As the children prior registered violence in the Vietnam footage from seeing the true human figure, we begin to more realistically relate to these creatures.

This, in conjunction with using real photos of Art’s father, helps the viewer come to realize that these events happened to real people, along with the very real implications behind the events of the book.

In the context of Saginaw, he begins to shed light on the reality of what his family went through in a similar manor as Art. The album’s cover contains a photo of his ancestors, in their home in Hiroshima back in 1916. On the back, as Art did to depict his father, a photo of Shigeto Ohmura appears on the back, the true influence of this piece. (Tabar) These photographs add a sense of realism to the concept of the piece, and though it’s contents can provide a brighter message at times, Saginaw makes the reality of this situation clear by displaying his family amongst the artwork.

This boils down to one question… why? Why choose to depict these people in their true nature? What is the benefit of subjecting the viewer, listener, and reader, to the reality of these situations? 

Some might argue that Art is using the reality of this situation to create a mutual guilt within the reader. I, however, disagree with this sentiment. 

To me, in both Saginaw’s work and Art’s novel, these pieces express the reality for one sole purpose: to create awareness that the subject of these pieces are all real people who experienced these traumatic events. Though Maus trivializes these subjects into animals, the obvious fact of the matter is that they were all human.

This stems back to the root of all cultural oppression: what does it mean to be human? Just because we see these men as mice does not mean that these people aren’t human. Yet, in the eyes of the Third Reich and other oppressive constructs in government, those subject to these catastrophes weren’t human themselves.

We see countless examples of seeing one as less than human throughout the texts of this course. The most telling example lies within Frankenstein. Within the entire duration of the text, the monster is never even given a name. A creature, which has a form so similar to a human, along with the ability to learn, progress, and express, is never even given a proper name. This is due to the general perception of his kind: a monster.

In many ways, this is similar to how the Jewish culture was treated during World War II. During the Holocaust, prisoners who were placed into internment camps were given a number. That number would be sub-sequentially tattooed onto them (usually on the lower right forearm) as identification (This needs a source). Similar to how the monster was considered a monster, these people were referred to as numbers. The Third Reich took away a basic human privilege: an actual name.

This oppression and lack of humanity truly resonates throughout these pieces. This oppression led to an eternal guilt within Art, an inferiority complex with the monster, and an emotional struggle with cultural disconnect for Saginaw. The heavy emotional content that pushed all of these artists to create these pieces all stem from a place of compassion, a place of humane justice for their family, and a place that is full of emotional uncertainty. 

These pieces strongly represent the resonation and current prevalence of these issues, even within the current generation. The idea that their families were considered less than human, and the compassion these artists have for their culture shows the effects of these catastrophes still resonate in a big way today, and as long as they continue to resonate, we can remain aware of how oppression harms humanity, both on a personal and societal level. 

 

 

(still lots to expand on/talk about, but here's what I've got) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

Kirsh, Steven J. "Cartoon Violence and Aggression in Youth." Aggression and Violent Behavior 11.6 (2006): 547-57. Geneseo.edu. Elsevier Ltd, 2006. Web. 15 Nov. 2014.

 

Renteln, Alison D. " A Psychohistorical Analysis of the Japanese American Internment." Project Muse, Nov. 1995. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.

 

Tabar, Cyrus. "Episode 5 - Shigeto - Part 2." YouTube. YouTube, 26 Mar. 2013. Web. 18 Nov. 2014.

 

Harich-Schneider, Eta. A History of Japanese Music. London: Oxford UP, 1973. Print. 16 Nov. 2014.

 

Snow, R. P. "How Children Interpret TV Violence in Play Context." Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 51.1 (1974): 13-21. Geneseo.edu. Web. 16 Nov. 2014.

Finegan Rough Draft.docx  

 

 

Final Draft - World Masterpieces .pdf