I am writing a paper about Art Spiegelman's Maus, specifically the metaphor that Spiegelman creates by depicting his obviously quite human characters with the heads of various animals, or a couple times animal masks. The metaphor is used at times to bestialize/animalize the acts of the Nazis and, in some cases, to show the arbitrary nature of the classes/groups/divisions they and others applied to human beings.
I considered "chremamorphism," but this describes the attribution of the characteristics of an object to, or the objectification of, a human. I also considered "animalize" and "bestialize," but those describe some of the effects that can be produced by Spiegelman's metaphor, not the metaphor itself – in many scenes in the book, the characters are extremely human, and I think that the negative or degrading connotations of these words makes them inappropriate for this use. Nor do "anthropomorphism" or "personification" fit, because Spiegelman is not applying human characteristics to animals but the other way around. None of the words that I can think of quite fit.
What is a word that accurately describes Art Spiegelman's depiction of obviously human characters as having animal body parts or wearing animal masks in the comic book Maus?
Best Answer
You can probably get some mileage out of 'zoomorphism':
The primary sense is, however,
(From zoomorphism. (n.d.) American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. (2011). Retrieved September 24 2015 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/zoomorphism.)