George Saunders

Critical Essays

Philip Coleman, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff, Philip Coleman, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319499314
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319499321
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This timely volume explores the signal contribution George Saunders has made to the development of the short story form in books ranging from CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1996) to Tenth of December (2013). The book brings together a team of scholars from around the world to explore topics ranging from Saunders's treatment of work and religion to biopolitics and the limits of the short story form. It also includes an interview with Saunders specially conducted for the volume, and a preliminary bibliography of his published works and critical responses to an expanding and always exciting creative œuvre. Coinciding with the release of the Saunders' first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017 ), George Saunders: Critical Essays is the first book-length consideration of a major contemporary author's work. It is essential reading for anyone interested in twenty-first century fiction.

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Chapter 1: “A Job to Do”*: George Saunders on, and at, Work
• Chapter 2: Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom in the Short Fiction of George Saunders
• Chapter 3: Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity
• Chapter 4: “Hope that, in Future, All Is well”: American Exceptionalism and Hopes for Resistance in Two Stories by George Saunders
• Chapter 5: Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland: The Four Institutional Monologues of George Saunders
• Chapter 6: Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: “Pastoralia” as Human Zoo
• Chapter 7: Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories
• Chapter 8: The Absent Presence of the Deus Absconditus in the Work of George Saunders
• Chapter 9: Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction
• Chapter 10: Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary Darkenfloxx™
• Chapter 11: Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: A Post-Jungian Reading
• Chapter 12: Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary in “Sea Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American”
• Chapter 13: “Third-person Ventriloquism”: Microdialogues and Polyphony in George Saunders’s “Victory Lap”
• Chapter 14: “A Little at a Time. And Iteratively”: A Conversation with George Saunders
• George Saunders: A Preliminary Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index