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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
George Saunders
Title Title Title
Critical Essays
Series Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
Aim of the Series
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States.
George Saunders
Critical Essays
Editors
Philip Coleman Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
School of English Independent Scholar
Trinity College Dublin Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Dublin, Ireland
v
vi PREFACE
The New Yorker and other major publications, but not before marriage,
fatherhood, and nearly a decade making ends meet as a technical writer had
passed. Following the publication of his first collection, CivilWarLand in
Bad Decline (1996), Syracuse invited him to return as an instructor in the
MFA program that had fostered him, and he has taught there ever since.
Three more collections of stories have followed, including Pastoralia
(2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013).
He has also written a children’s book, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip
(2000), and a novella, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005).
GQ Magazine hired him to write a series of travel pieces, and he has taken
opportunities to write non-fiction as they have arisen, many of those essays
being collected in The Braindead Megaphone (2007). After his commence-
ment address to Syracuse University’s graduating class of 2013 went viral
online, thanks to The New York Times, it was published in a small gift book
edition titled Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness. In
2015, he finished drafting a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, to be published in
the United States on St Valentine’s Day, 2017. Lincoln in the Bardo is not
considered in this volume. Rather, George Saunders’s contribution to the
development of the short story is the central focus of the essays gathered
here. In terms of his output as a short story writer alone, Saunders counts
as one of the most significant and influential practitioners of the form in
recent memory.
Saunders’s journey to bestseller lists and guest spots on Stephen
Colbert’s television shows through his work as a short story writer took
twenty years from the advent of his first publication in The New Yorker.
His numerous literary honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship
(2001), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant
(2006). Among those awards given for his latest collection, Tenth of
December, are the Story Prize (2013) and the Folio Prize (2014), secur-
ing his respect as a global writer of Anglophone literature. Along with
other prizes, his work has caught the attention of literary scholars. In July
2014, for example, at the 13th International Conference of the Society
for the Study of the Short Story in English, held in Vienna, Austria, a
panel on Saunders’s short fiction was held. The present volume grew
out of that panel. To date, no single monograph or collection of critical
essays on Saunders has appeared. The editors and contributors to this
volume, who come from six different countries, hereby represent the
first extended critical study of an author who is currently being appreci-
ated and studied internationally as much as other American short fiction
PREFACE vii
his ghosts and amusement parks a mode of storytelling that is above all
empathetic.
Taking a different tack, Jurrit Daalder argues that the travails suffered by
Saunders’s characters—and inflicted vicariously upon his readers—equate
authorial cruelty. He finds in “Sea Oak” a story redeemed not by sincer-
ity but rather the range of metafeelings that ironic doubling can evoke.
Richard Lee, in his contribution, focuses not on Saunders-as-manipulative
but rather Saunders-as-cryptic, withholding from readers for years that his
Four Institutional Monologues, first published in McSweeney’s, are a medi-
tation on how modern America would go about bureaucratizing geno-
cide. Also highlighting Saunders’s cautions against the power of corporate
America, David Huebert’s essay examines the biopolitics of “Pastoralia”
and the problems of human-on-human spectatorship. Panning out from
human to holy spectatorship, Aidan Cottrell-Boyce presents a Lutheran
reading of “Brad Carrigan, American,” “Isabelle,” and “Jon.” Here, the
unknowability of God is ground for revelatory searches experienced by
Saunders’s characters in crisis. Steve Gronert Ellerhoff undertakes the
oneiric quest for narrative in a post-Jungian reading of “The Semplica Girl
Diaries,” a story born in dream that took Saunders thirteen years to finish.
Michael Trussler, then, undertaking the dead with Giorgio Agamben and
Theodor Adorno as pallbearers, exhumes the zombies populating “Sea
Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American.” Trussler’s account, vouching for
the hope of something better, shows that Saunders’s irony ensures that
the nothingness of death cannot be assuaged. Last but by no means least,
the first essay in the present volume, by Kasia Boddy, ponders Saunders’s
serendipitous working life, its effects on his fictional representations of the
American workplace, and how these shape our consideration of him as
a writer. Establishing a strong understanding of where George Saunders
came from—and where that has taken his career in writing fiction—
Boddy’s analysis is the best place to begin the first book-length contribu-
tion to the field in studying his major contribution to the development of
narrative art in the early twenty-first century.
In the final sections of this book, readers will also find a new interview
with George Saunders, conducted via e-mail by Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
especially for the present volume, as well as the first effort to build a com-
prehensive, chronological bibliography of Saunders’s publications to date,
compiled by the editors with the assistance of Emily Bourke. This list of
primary and secondary sources includes the author’s short fiction, non-
fiction, story collections, interviews, reviews, and scholarly articles written
PREFACE ix
about his work up until the end of 2016. This bibliography will inevitably
grow in the years to come, and it is offered at this point with the intention
of serving the critical reader well in her engagement with Saunders’s work.
Taken together, the essays in this volume do not provide a conclusive or
closed statement about the value of Saunders’s writing. Rather, they issue
an invitation to further critical engagement with an astonishingly original
contemporary author whose work is by no means finished.
In fact, the publication of this volume coincides with the release of
George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is sure to spring
forth further articles and new considerations of Saunders’s work that may
advance and complement but also complicate the readings offered here.
Alternating chapters of conversation attributed to ghosts with extracts
from actual historical accounts, Saunders, facing “the technical challenges
of the book,”3 has achieved an original form in his first novel that reads
simply despite its complexity. “At this stage of one’s career it’s kind of the
perfect thing to do,” he has explained, “something that’s not quite natural
but feels like it would make you grow.”4 Taking as the germ of inspiration
a newspaper report from 1862 of President Lincoln’s Pietà moments when
visiting the crypt where his son Willie’s body was interred, Saunders offers
up voices of the imagined past with paranormal phantasmagoria. The result
is a tender romp that comes out part As I Lay Dying, part Our Town, and
part Beetlejuice. Running with the common motif of ghosts having unfin-
ished business, the novel is an adventure of the spirit, presenting a mythic
account of Willie Lincoln’s soul escaping limbo. “I had been reading some
Tibetan Buddhist stuff about what they call the bardo state, from the Bardo
of the title,” Saunders says, “and that is just everything that happens from
the time that you die till you’re reborn. And in the Buddhist epistemology,
as in Christian ones, it can be quite vivid and quite terrifying, wonderful.”5
Those dallying in Oak Hill Cemetery are not the only phantoms present
in the novel; those who wrote the histories, extracted and collaged for
descriptive effect in developing character and setting, are by and large dead
now, making theirs the voices of ghosts as well. History—especially that
of personal-level traumas of the American Civil War—emerges as a collec-
tive specter looming over the United States of today, a country undergo-
ing new inflections of old divisions concerning war, race, and politics. The
appropriately sentimental problem propelling the book, however, is more
fundamentally human: what are human beings, in this or any time, to do
when it comes to the experience of a parent grieving the death of a child—
and what happens to us and our loved ones when we die?
x PREFACE
Notes
1. See “Jonathan Franzen discusses his new book,” available online at: http://
www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s3081008.htm
2. See Susan Lohafer, Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical
Poetics, and Culture in the Short Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP,
2003).
3. “George Saunders was live.” @GeorgeSaundersFans. Facebook (12 May
2016): web.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
Acknowledgments
This volume has its basis in a panel dedicated to the work of George
Saunders held at the thirteenth biennial conference of the Society for
the Study of the Short Story at the University of Vienna, Austria, in the
Summer of 2014. The editors wish to thank the conference organizers,
and especially Maurice Lee and Susan Lohafer, for including a session on
Saunders on the conference program, as well as the scholars who partici-
pated in discussions in Vienna and contributed to the present volume.
In addition, the editors wish to acknowledge the support of Emily
Bourke, who provided invaluable assistance, especially in the preparation
of the preliminary bibliography of Saunders’s work included in this vol-
ume. Special thanks are also due to George Saunders, who agreed to give
an interview especially for use in this book, and has supported the proj-
ect throughout its development with encouraging messages and generous
goodwill at every stage. The editors thank Richie Lee for making the ini-
tial introduction that allowed all of that to happen.
A number of people at Palgrave Macmillan, in the United States, the
United Kingdom and India, have been hugely helpful in the production of
this volume. The editors thank Peter Carey, Ben Doyle, April James, Ryan
Jenkins, Rajkishore Rout, Ruby Panigrahi, Brigitte Schull, and Paloma
Yannakakis, in particular, and all at Palgrave Macmillan who helped to
prepare this book for publication. Thanks are also due to the anonymous
peer reviewers whose vote of confidence allowed for this volume to appear
as part of the American Literature Readings in the 21st Century series,
edited by Linda Wagner-Martin.
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
xiii
xiv Contents
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