Literary Dimensions Seminar

This talk is based on the forthcoming book Filial Lines and examines an absurd, tic-tac-toe-faced avatar created by the world-renowned cartoonist Art Spiegelman, known as "OXO." The central argument is that Spiegelman's adoption of the "OXO" persona functions as a coded emblem of his process of coming to terms with traumatic loss. The figure of "OXO" and his tic-tac-toe-faced family—first introduced in 1983, contemporaneously with Spiegelman's work on Maus—serve as a kind of mask or cover through which the cartoonist reenters and reimagines both recent and distant memories of loss, in an ongoing and necessarily incomplete effort to master them.