THE GRAPHIC NOVEL BETWEEN METAFICTION AND MEMORY

Abstract

This paper examines Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a paradigmatic case of transformation within the contemporary literary field. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the literary field, the article argues that literary value in the late twentieth and early twenty first century is increasingly defined not by media purity but by reflexivity, ethical awareness, and consciousness of representational mediation. Within this framework, Maus is analysed as a work in which metafiction and intermedial memory function as central structural principles. The analysis demonstrates that the metafictional dimension of Maus does not operate as a postmodern narrative play, but rather as an epistemological strategy that exposes the limits of representing historical trauma. At the same time, the intermedial structure of the graphic novel enables memory to be articulated as a process emerging from the tension between testimony, archive, image, and text. Such an approach resists the stabilization of historical narrative and instead foregrounds fragmentation, mediation, and openness. The paper concludes that Maus should not be understood as an exceptional graphic novel that gained literary legitimacy, but as a turning point in the redefinition of the literary field itself. In this context, the graphic novel emerges as a theoretically relevant form of contemporary literature, capable of articulating complex relations between narrative, memory, and ethical responsibility