ESSAY CEMETERY

In his 1757 treatise, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", Edmund Burke presents his views on the concept of the sublime. He theorizes that the sublime is a powerful feeling evoked by the apprehension of danger or death. As such, it is an element central to many narratives that explore human experience. The element of the sublime is inherent in stories spanning different genres and eras, from historically realistic portrayals of war to cyberpunk visions of technologically-dominated futures. The sublime according to Burke is "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". This strongest emotion is not pleasant, but painful. Burke postulates that pain, danger and the prospect of death "are much more powerful than … pleasure". Death, he says, is more powerful than pain. Fear, "being an apprehension of pain or death", is an evoker of the sublime as well. The common thread to all these

1. Introduction: Spiegelman's Maus and Ricoeur's concept of narrative time Art Spiegelman is the author of Maus , a two-volume book in cartoon form. The book is an autobiography as well as a biography of Art's father, Vladek, who was a Holocaust survivor. Maus moves back and forth between scenes from Art's life in New York City and depictions of Vladek in the Holocaust. Spiegelman explores his father's past, his own past and his own present as part of the struggle he experiences in being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Throughout the work, Spiegelman's story is closely twined with that of his father. Indeed, the narrative moves between time frames so frequently that story of father and story of son begin to merge, and Spiegelman's identity becomes closely associated with the life of his father. Paul Ricoeur's concept, which he develops in his essay "Narrative Time," is a valuable aid in understanding the role of these shifts be