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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century GTeiotlreg eT iStlaeu Tnidtleers Critical Essays EDITED BY PHILIP COLEMAN, STEVE GRONERT ELLERHOFF American Literature Readings in the 21st Century 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. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14765 Philip Coleman • Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Editors George Saunders Critical Essays Editors Philip Coleman Steve Gronert Ellerhoff School of English Independent Scholar Trinity College Dublin Des Moines, Iowa, USA Dublin, Ireland American Literature Readings in the 21st Century ISBN 978-3-319-49931-4 ISBN 978-3-319-49932-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49932-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930700 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image © Kevin Storrar Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P reface “The story is talking back to you,” George Saunders says in an interview conducted especially for this volume, “and then you have to sort of start serving it.” This point of view, in which a story is numinous—practically conscious as it is being written—places short fiction in a realm of mystery. What happens when we consider a piece of writing as being sentient or at least bearing an intelligence and relatability all its own? Saunders is a writer with faith in the form, one who places trust and reverence in a literary art that he serves well. For him, a story knows what it wants, possibly before the author knows what that is, and his or her duty is to do what can be done to provide that. Other writers will disagree. Jonathan Franzen, for instance, aligns himself with Vladimir Nabokov when it comes to exerting complete control over writing.1 For Franzen, if we believe what he has to tell us, characters behave the way they do because that is what he makes them do. Saunders, who often refers to himself as a control freak, exerts a different kind of power over his fiction; drafting, redrafting, and revising, over and over, he practices a discipline that honors his stories as having autochthonous origins. Far more trusting of intuition, he excavates and compresses language as he works layer by layer to create through sedimen- tary means a piece of writing possessing that recognizable quality Susan Lohafer has termed “storyness.”2 It may be appropriate to relate to Saunders’s work in geological terms, seeing as he was first educated and employed as a geophysicist. Leaving engineering for creative writing, he became part of the MFA lineage at Syracuse University, being taught by Tobias Wolff, who was taught by Raymond Carver. Like them he would find his short stories published in 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 writers beside whom he is often cited, such as Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, T.C. Boyle, David Foster Wallace, Lydia Davis, and many others. It might be said, too, that along with metaphysical concerns for the place of short fiction in readers’ and writers’ lives, George Saunders writes with a strong sense of the moral agency of literature. Like John Gardner and Vonnegut before him, he aims to appeal to conscience while tumbling his characters through traumas that run the gamut of disturbing to wacky. His stories, without simply moralizing, often affirm certain moral posi- tions that can be troublingly ambiguous. One thing Saunders is unam- biguous about in his speaking engagements is the necessity for goodwill in people’s relations with one another. If O’Connor, with her canon of grotesques, zealots, and racists, is remembered for her “mystery and man- ners,” Saunders might be distinguished in terms of mystery and kindness. This aspect of his project coincides with growing interdisciplinary inter- est and research into the phenomenon of empathy and how—and even why—it is achieved. In the present volume, Michael Basseler broaches the concept of narra- tive empathy, identifying elements in Saunders’s fiction that reveal his eth- ics of compassion. Clare Hayes-Brady, distilling the linguistics of The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, examines the ways that Saunders draws attention to the idea that the language we use controls the way we think in stories such as “I CAN SPEAK!™” and “Victory Lap.” Inner dialogue and Saunders’s use of what he terms third-person ventriloquism form the crux of Cameron Wilson’s essay on “Victory Lap,” in which he employs Bakhtin’s notions of microdialogues and polyphony to explore how the author puts readers in the heads of his characters. For Gillian Moore, then, Saunders is a political author whose modes of storytelling—even wind- ing up on the side of Chipotle fast food to-go bags—imperfectly exploit a corporate paradigm in an attempt to raise social awareness and a sense of hope. Her readings of “Bounty” and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” sug- gest his characters often uphold the fantasies of American exceptional- ism. Adam Kelly, also concerned with the politics of language, mines from “The Falls” and “Escape from Spiderhead” a neoliberal ore that places Saunders in the literary movement Kelly and others have termed the New Sincerity. Kelly’s reading of Saunders extracts the limits of expressive sub- jectivity, ethical consciousness, and aesthetic spectatorship, insisting that these raise questions readers must answer themselves. Dana Del George, meanwhile, addressing Saunders in the context of magic realism, finds in viii PREFACE 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?

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.