University of South Carolina-Aiken issued the following announcement on March 29.
For more information contact: USC Aiken News (803) 641-3738, news@usca.edu
Aiken, SC (03/29/2022) — The University of South Carolina Aiken (USC Aiken) Gregg-Graniteville Library and Library Committee have organized an event centering on the text, context, and 2022 ban of Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel "Maus." The event will take place on April 5 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm in Penland 106 and will feature discussions by USC Aiken faculty members Dr. Matthew Miller (English), Dr. Samuel Pierce (history, political science, and philosophy), and Prof. Brandy Horne (Gregg-Graniteville Library) as well as a Q and A session. The event is free and open to the public.
Spiegelman's "Maus" is a mixed-genre non-fiction account of his Jewish family's experience in Poland, occupied Germany, and extermination camps during the Holocaust. The graphic novel depicts Spiegelman, his family, and the Jewish people as mice and Germans as cats. The images and text convey a complex story of generational trauma and personal struggle.
Maus, despite being an internationally recognized and celebrated text, was unanimously banned from classrooms by a school board in McMinn County Tennessee in January of this year for "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide." The banned text then launched to the top of the best sellers list (31 years after its publication).
The event is scheduled to coincide with National Library Week and to bring attention to increased threats to intellectual freedom on and off-campus. As part of USC Aiken's Inter-curricular Enrichment (ICE) program, this event is part of a university-wide initiative aimed at engaging USC Aiken students through a series of diverse curricular opportunities that are provocative, insightful, informative, and which facilitate deeper newfound understandings and perspectives.
Original source can be found here.
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