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American Literature Readings in the 21st Century
George Saunders
Title Title Title
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
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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
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Cover image © Kevin Storrar
Printed on acid-free paper
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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface
“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?
x PREFACE
Readers have much to look forward to from George Saunders, an

author who continues to experiment and bring forth new dynamics in the
craft of composing fictions that strive to convey all that is “terrifying” and
“wonderful” in modern and contemporary experience.
Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

Philip Coleman
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
Philip Coleman acknowledges the support and friendship of colleagues

and staff in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, where a great
deal of the work for this volume was done.
Steve Gronert Ellerhoff gives thanks to family and friends, most espe-
cially Kevin Storrar, whose art graces the cover. He is also grateful for new
friendships that precipitated as a result of this project.
Quotations from the works of George Saunders are published with the
following permissions:
Excerpts from THE BRAINDEAD MEGAPHONE: ESSAYS by
George Saunders, copyright © 2007 by George Saunders. Used by per-
mission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpts from THE BRIEF AND FRIGHTENING REIGN OF PHIL
by George Saunders, copyright © 2005 by George Saunders. Used by per-
mission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division
of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpts from CIVILWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE: STORIES
AND A NOVELLA by George Saunders, copyright © 1996 by George
Saunders. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division
of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from “Design Proposal” and “A Friendly Reminder” by
George Saunders, copyright © 2000 by George Saunders. Used by per-
mission of George Saunders.
Excerpts from IN PERSUASION NATION: STORIES by George
Saunders, copyright © 2006 by George Saunders. Used by permission of
Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC.
Excerpts from PASTORALIA: STORIES by George Saunders, copyright
© 2000 by George Saunders. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint
of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpts from TENTH OF DECEMBER: STORIES by George
Saunders, copyright © 2013 by George Saunders. Used by permission
of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House
LLC. All rights reserved.
Photo image of “Four Institutional Monologues” by George Saunders,
copyright © 2000 by George Saunders. Used by permission of George
Saunders.
Cover image of “George Saunders” by Kevin Storrar, copyright © 2016
by Kevin Storrar. Used by permission of Kevin Storrar.
Contents
1 “A Job to Do”: George Saunders on, and at, Work 1

Kasia Boddy
2 Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom

in the Short Fiction of George Saunders 23
Clare Hayes-Brady
3 Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism:

George Saunders’s New Sincerity 41
Adam Kelly
4 “Hope that, in Future, All Is well”:

American Exceptionalism and Hopes for Resistance
in Two Stories by George Saunders 59
Gillian Elizabeth Moore
5 Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland:

The Four Institutional Monologues of George Saunders 77
Richard E. Lee
xiii
xiv Contents
6 Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores,

Synthetic Primitives: “Pastoralia” as Human Zoo 105
David Huebert
7 Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural

and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories 121
Dana Del George
8 The Absent Presence of the Deus Absconditus

in the Work of George Saunders 137
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
9 Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction 153

Michael Basseler
10 Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary

Darkenfloxx™ 173
Jurrit Daalder
11 Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”:

A Post-Jungian Reading 189
12 Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary

in “Sea Oak” and “Brad Carrigan, American” 205
Michael Trussler
13 “Third-person Ventriloquism”: Microdialogues

and Polyphony in George Saunders’s “Victory Lap” 221
Robert Cameron Wilson
14 “A Little at a Time. And Iteratively”:

A Conversation with George Saunders 237
Contents xv
George Saunders: A Preliminary Bibliography 245

Emily Bourke, Philip Coleman, and Steve Gronert Ellerhoff
Notes on Contributors 267
Works Cited 273
Index
287
CHAPTER 1
“A Job to Do”*: George Saunders on,

and at, Work
Kasia Boddy
George Saunders’s website features a short autobiography. Nothing

unusual in that, except for the fact that it largely consists of a list of jobs
Saunders had before his appointment, in 1996, to the more familiar occu-
pation of university professor, teaching on the Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
program at Syracuse University. Some of his earlier jobs were skilled pro-
fessional posts—field geophysicist (he worked as a seismic prospector in
Sumatra), technical writer for a pharmaceutical company and then an envi-
ronmental engineering company—but Saunders also informs readers that
he has had experience as “a doorman, a roofer, a convenience store clerk,
and a slaughterhouse worker (a ‘knuckle-puller,’ to be exact).”1 Why pro-
duce such a list? Because, he goes on, those jobs made him the kind of
writer he is, or, more specifically, “all this contributed to my understand-
ing of capitalism as a benign-looking thing that, as Terry Eagleton says,
‘plunders the sensuality of the body.’”2
*George Saunders, “Exhortation,” in Tenth of December (London: Bloomsbury,

2014), 83.
K. Boddy (*)
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
© The Author(s) 2017 1

P. Coleman, S. Gronert Ellerhoff (eds.), George Saunders,
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49932-1_1
2 KASIA BODDY
“Work Work Work”3

“Monday …means work.
Work work work. Stupid work. Am so tired of work.”4
“Do you know what we do? In our country? We work.”5
In recent years, and particularly in the wake of the financial crisis of

2007–2009, American fiction has started to think again about money, class,
and the “trial and toil of work.”6 With Melville’s “Bartleby” as its ur-text,7
the emphasis of recent fiction is usually on pointless or “bullshit jobs,”8 jobs
that are “dull” and “interminable,”9 a kind of living death of pettiness and
paranoia, often concerning office supplies.10 The narrator of Sam Lipsyte’s
The Ask (2010), for example, has a “Post-It note on his computer” to
remind him “to order more Post-It notes,”11 while a pivotal event in Joshua
Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007) concerns the swapping of office
chairs; crisis looms when the staff realize that management is keeping track
of each chair’s serial number. The Pale King (2011), David Foster Wallace’s
posthumously published novel about “enduring tedium” in the Peoria
IRS office, details the “distracting little rituals” of desk work: “fidgeting
and sharpening and organizing pencils and doing skin-checks in the men’s
room mirror” and “seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip
into, & c.”12 One character looks forward to a fifteen-minute break from
“rote tasks” in a windowless room, only to spend that break in an identical
room “counting the seconds tick off”; another puts a cartoon above her
desk featuring “a crude caricature of an angry face and below it the caption
‘I have got one nerve left…AND YOU’RE GETTING ON IT!’”; a third
keeps a .22 revolver in her bag because she “had promised herself a bullet
in the roof of her mouth after her 1500th training presentation.”13
The despair that Saunders explores is a little different. He is cer-
tainly alert to boredom and bureaucracy, to highly stratified and com-
pulsively monitored workplaces governed by “Daily Partner Performance
Evaluation Forms” (signed in triplicate), places where throwing a Tab can
in the wrong bucket can result in the “Observation” of “Recycling” and
“Ergonomic” errors,14 and where the linguistic subterfuge of corporate
euphemism—“Mud-Consistency Testing Associate,” “Manual Site
Aesthetics Improvement,” and “Staff Remixing”—provides an endlessly
rich vein for satirical mining.15 Some stories even adopt the form, as well
as the language, of office documents: a letter from a “product service
GEORGE SAUNDERS ON, AND AT, WORK 3
representative” or a memo from the “divisional director” to his staff.16

The latter (as the title tells us) is really an “Exhortation” about something
more than “performance stats.” What is the “hard work” that needs doing
in Room 6? Why are workers having “namby pamby thoughts of right/
wrong, etc.”? But the memo-writer tries to keep things “positive” with
hokey analogies (“Say we need to clean a shelf. Let’s use that example.”).17
This approach is justified (according to another memo-writer in another
story) by the fact that if the business is “a family,” the workers are “the
children”: “you do most of the chores while we do all the thinking.”18
Despite a shared interest in corporate discourse, Saunders’s treatment
of work differs from that of Ferris, Lipsyte, or Wallace in several ways. The
workers he describes are less likely to be “drones in a cubicle,” high-tech
“microserfs”, than low-level service economy, or “experience economy,”
employees.19 Furthermore, as should already be apparent, his approach is
more directly comical and, at least in his early works, “exuberantly weird”
than Ferris and Lipsyte or even Wallace.20 Sarah Pogell describes Saunders’s
style as “post-postmodern”; Mark McGurl thinks it crosses “Carver’s lower-
middle-class-loser aesthetic with some of the surreal craziness and violent
public-spherity … of Donald Barthelme.”21 But he might also be consid-
ered as a romancer, in terms similar to those used by Nathaniel Hawthorne
in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, Saunders’s own description of the
necessity of an “artistic uncoupling from the actual” recalls Hawthorne’s
sense of the “certain latitude” allowed in the “neutral territory … where
the Actual and Imaginary may meet.”22 Saunders’s neutral territories—
businesses such as Burn’n’ Learn, DrugTown, or HardwareNiche23—are
just-heightened realities, where people work “long hour jobs,” sometimes
with a second “on the side,” and often “for minimum.”24 They are usu-
ally “beyond broke” and “own nothing,”25 and are therefore particularly
vulnerable to economic recession, aka “budget crunch,” “panic-sell,” and
“austerity.”26 Sometimes, they “think about quitting,” but worry that “if
you step off the treadmill for a minute, you lose everything you’ve worked
for.”27 They remember their last attempt to get a new job (“two hundred
send outs and no nibbles”) and their maxed-out credit cards, “car pay-
ments,” and the “little playhouse” the kids love that they are “still paying
off.”28 They make calculations like this:
Visa full. Also Amex full and Discover nearly full. Called Discover: $200 avail.
If we transfer $200 from checking (once paycheck comes in), would then
have $400 avail. on Discover …. Paycheck must come, must put paycheck in
4 KASIA BODDY
checking pronto, hope paycheck clears quickly. And then, when doing bills,
pick bills totalling $200 to not pay. To defer paying.29
Saunders’s characters are not, in other words, unmarried college gradu-

ates but, for the most part, traditional family men prepared to do almost
anything to support the children they rarely see. “It is necessary at this
point for me to be, you know, a rock,” thinks the narrator of “Pastoralia,”
“to do what I can do, which is keep the money coming in.”30 While he is
working as a caveman impersonator in a theme park, his wife is looking
after their sick son. He is not allowed to speak English (only “guttural
sounds” are permitted), and so he communicates with his wife by fax.31
Here, and elsewhere in Saunders’s work, messages from home (by fax,
phone, Skype, or “memory loop”) introduce into the story the pathos,
and moral conscience, of a woman’s voice:
… Please don’t worry. Well worry a little. We are at the end of our rope or
however you say it, I’m already deep into the overdraft account and it’s only
the 5th. Plus I’m so tired at night I can’t get to the bills and last time I paid
late fees on both Visas and MasterCard, thirty bucks a pop, those bastards …32
The fact that the narrator of “Pastoralia” impersonates a caveman in order

to afford medical treatment for his son—“Evemplorine went up to $70 for
120 count,” his wife faxes, “Insurance said they won’t pay”33—is perhaps a
comment on the stone-age condition of the American health-care system.
Others, though, go into debt for goods that no one really needs. “The
Semplica Girl Diaries,” another of Saunders’s strongest stories, is about
the pressures of relative poverty, about the way that “rich people make us
middle people feel dopey and inadequate.” “Lord, give us more,” prays
the narrator. “Give us enough. Help us not fall behind peers. Help us
not, that is, fall further behind peers. For kids’ sake. Do not want them
scarred by how far behind we are.”34 And so he buys some Semplica Girls,
immigrant women attached by a microline through their brains, to hang
decoratively in the backyard.
For all that he often includes fantastical elements, Saunders neverthe-
less depicts a recognizable America of ever-increasing “work-and-spend”,
and debt.35 Between 1973 and 2000, the working year of “the average
American worker” increased by 199 hours or (assuming a 40-hour work
week) nearly five additional weeks.36 This seemed paradoxical, given the
introduction during this period of many labor-saving technologies, but, the
economist Juliet Schor argues, those technologies also represented oppor-

tunities for making more money, and their introduction led to changes in
the labor market which structurally embedded the culture of job insecurity
and rising consumer norms that Saunders so vividly describes.
Emotional and Bodily Labor

“Thinking Positive/Saying Positive”37
“What am I saying? Am I saying whistle while you work? Maybe I am.”38
“You got a trust fund? You a genius? Show your cock. It’s what you’ve got.”39
Arlie Russell Hochschild was one of the first sociologists to consider the
labor involved in the “commercialization of human feeling” in terms of
performance. Focusing on the ways in which the feelings of workers in
service industries had become part of their job, she distinguished between
two forms of “acting” required: surface acting—“the put-on sneer, the
posed shrug, the controlled sigh”—and deep acting—where “the actor
does not try to seem happy or sad but rather expresses spontaneously … a
real feeling that has been self-induced.”40 Hochschild’s book The Managed
Heart (1979) focused on flight attendants and the extent to which their
work depended on “feelings rules,” policed by supervisors who came to
resemble “paid stage managers.”41 These ideas have subsequently been
applied to all kinds of jobs requiring human interaction (waiters, police
officers, doctors, and nail technicians), and in 1999, two management
consultants, arguing that “every business is a stage, and therefore work is
theatre,” suggested that we now live in an “experience economy.”42
Saunders’s fiction explores this economy in a variety of ways: most
directly, in stories set in theme parks, where employees are required to
dress up and perform roles,43 but also in businesses that offer carefully
edited experiences and feelings, through such technological, surgical, and
pharmaceutical means as “computer simulations,” “personal interactive
holography,” or “stylized …. memory loops.”44 Those who work in these
places have strict “feelings rules” to follow, for it is “negative” attitudes
(rather than low productivity) that threaten their jobs.45 In “Jon,” a story
about teenagers who believe that by working in a product-testing “facility”
they have “influence in the world,” positivity is ensured by a daily dose of
anti-depressants. Participants who feel their mood slipping must complete
a “Work-Affecting Mood-Problem Notification” and get an extra dose.46
6 KASIA BODDY
For Hochschild, the main problem of emotional labor is the “emo-

tive dissonance” it creates between performed and real feelings, and The
Managed Heart ends by reminding readers to ask themselves “what do I
really feel?”47 The assertion that there are such things as real (as opposed
to performed or drug-induced) feelings derives from a humanist belief in
an essential authentic self, and it is that self, “the real me,” which Saunders
also hopes to reveal.48 Again women often lead the way. In “Jon,” the nar-
rator’s girlfriend stops taking the company drug when she gets pregnant,
allowing her to respond appropriately to such “negative things” as the
death of a child: “how about honouring that by continuing to feel bad,”
she challenges her co-workers.49 Jon’s dilemma is whether to follow her
out of the facility and, at the end, he gives up the “kind of happy” that
is “like chewing on tinfoil” for the real, uncertain, emotions of “true liv-
ing.”50 A similar pattern shapes “Escape from Spiderhead,” where a mur-
derer ends up in a prison-like research facility testing powerful drugs that
enhance verbal skills and induce strong emotions from love to despair—
“odd job of work, isn’t it?” asks a co-worker, but it is worse than that.51
Knowing that his next task will be to watch and describe a woman chemi-
cally driven to suicide, the man stops “to think” and decides to save her
by taking the drug himself: in making the decision, acknowledging real
feelings, it is “all me now.”52
For Saunders, escape from the pain of work is often figured as a release
from the body, hovering above the world—“happy, so happy”—as the
narrator does in the final pages of “Escape from Spiderhead”, or rampag-
ing through it like Aunt Bernie in “Sea Oak” who comes back from the
dead to ask “why do some people get everything and I got nothing?”53
But before liberation, and insight, comes a working life in which the body
is always implicated and affronted. Saunders’s characters get bitten by
dogs and raccoons; one is attacked by a gang whose members “put tiny
notches in his penis with their knives.”54 In “Pastoralia,” Louise jokes that
rather than pay the late fees on her credit cards, she is “thinking of saw-
ing off my arm and mailing it in,” but that freeing gesture is not possible
for, she acknowledges, “I need that arm to sign checks.”55 Her husband,
meanwhile, impersonating a caveman, has to conceal his personal waste
in “Human Refuse Bags” and pay a “Disposal Debit” (or, as he calls it, a
“Shit Fee”): “Why do you expect us to throw away your poop,” asks manage-
ment, “when after all you made it?”56
Still others do various kinds of sex-work, from “drive-through hand
jobs” to waiting tables while wearing an oversized “Penile Stimulator” for
$5 an hour plus tips.57 The latter, described by the narrator of “Sea Oak,”
is particularly “stressful” for “the minute your Cute Rating drops you’re
a goner. Guests rank as Knockout, Honeypie, Adequate, or Stinker.” He
is “a solid Honeypie/Adequate”; to get a better rating, and make more
money, he needs to show his real penis.58 David Rando argues that the
story presents “a form of labor that emasculates the worker through the
very performance of his ostensibly masculine work.”59 In doing so, it can
also, in part, be read as a reworking of Raymond Carver’s story “They’re
Not Your Husband.” Carver describes an unemployed salesman who goes
to the coffee shop where his wife works and watches customers ogle her as
she walks and bends over to scoop ice cream:
“Look at the ass on that.”...

The other man laughed. “I’ve seen better,” he said.60
Feeling his own life slipping from his control, the man takes charge of his
wife’s, putting her on a strict diet and monitoring the response of her,
or rather his, customers at the coffee shop. When another waitress asks
her, “Who is this joker anyway?” she replies, “He’s a salesman. He’s my
husband.”61 In the order of the description lies his identity. In Saunders’s
story, however, men must sell themselves and women are the sexual preda-
tors: “face the other way,” one customer complains, after throwing a dol-
lar on the floor, “so when you bend we can see your crack.”62
Another early Carver story that Saunders seems to be revisiting is “Fat,”
in which a waitress, after serving a very fat man, feels her “fixed” iden-
tity unsettled. “Fat trespasses,” says Lauren Berlant; that is, the man’s
excesses provide a counterpoint to the restrictions that govern the wait-
ress’s life and body.63 While he is unable to control his appetite (“there is
no choice,” he says), she struggles to “gain” anything64; the “conditions
of identity,” as Berlant puts it, “have been miniaturised.”65 Moreover, as
Maud Ellmann elaborates, the man’s presence both interrupts the “tedious
routine” of the working day and allows the staff at the diner to affirm
their “own normativity.”66 A similar dynamic is at play in Saunders’s “The
400-Pound CEO,” set in a pest-extermination firm misleadingly called
“Humane Raccoon Alternatives.” In Carver’s story, the waitress endures
taunts that she is “sweet on fat-stuff”67; in Saunders’s piece, the only chal-
lenge to “normativity” comes from the fat man himself. At one point,
a woman whom the narrator likes agrees to go out to dinner with him,
but while he enjoys “putting [him]self in her shoes and seeing things her
8 KASIA BODDY
way”68—Carver’s famous figuring of the storyteller’s role69—it turns out

she is only there to win a $50 bet from her co-workers and thus pay her
phone bill. Carver’s fat man exists to elicit discomfort and insight in those
around him, but Saunders promotes him to the position of narrator of,
and agent in, his own story.70 “What do they know of me?” he asks, and
what they—and we—do not know, he tells us. Moreover, Saunders allows
his fat man to graduate from the consolations of dessert to fulfilling every
worker’s fantasy of killing the boss; he even fakes a letter giving himself the
job of CEO. Of course, the plan cannot succeed any more than his dream
of everyone living “in harmony” and with “emotional support.”71 In prison,
however, he behaves “with dignity,” offering “a kind word” to the even less
fortunate, while remaining (in Berlant’s phrase) “cruelly optimistic” about
the possibility of a “different life”—much like the waitress in Carver’s story
who believes that any day now her life “is going to change.”72
The Work of Kindness

“Couldn’t we all, working together, devise a more humane approach?”73
“be kind to one another”74
If, or perhaps because, a different life is rarely possible, kind words are essen-
tial. This is a recurrent theme in Saunders’s moral fables, and he stated it
directly in his 2013 Commencement Address at Syracuse University. His
greatest regrets in life, he told the graduating students, were “failures of
kindness” or “selfishness.” For Saunders, being kind is both a personal and a
political imperative, but, most importantly for my purposes here, it is some-
thing that requires work: “go after these things,” he urged the graduates.75
The “classic American project of self-improvement” is a recurrent
satiric target in Saunders’s fiction.76 Self-help’s problems are various for
Saunders but, most importantly, in its fetishism of “exertion of will” and
“decision,” and concomitant denial of factors outside of the self (such as
biology or circumstance), it results in a denial of tolerance and kindness.77
“Winky,” for example, is about a desperate man called Neil who attends
a self-help seminar which tells him to look after number one, that now is
the “time for me to win.” In a borrowing from Huckleberry Finn’s moral
twist—Huck thinks he is being “wicked” when he does his best thing,
free the slave Jim—Saunders ends his tale with Neil’s recognition that he
is “too weak to change, too weak to make a new start”, too weak or too
kind, that is, to abandon his “fat, clinging” crazy sister.78 The seminar then
has, inadvertently, taught him something.
If Saunders rejects the self-orientation of “classic” self-help, he is nev-
ertheless committed to a form of self-culture. Working to become “our
best selves,” his stories insist, is possible, or perhaps even more likely,
in the worst environments.79 This is made explicit in The Very Persistent
Gappers of Frip (2000), a cautionary tale for children. With her mother
dead, her father grieving, and persistent “gappers” attacking her goats,
a young girl called Capable struggles to make ends meet. Remembering
her mother’s admonition that “if you need help, ask for help, you’re not
alone in this world,” she approaches her neighbors, the Romos and the
Ronsens.80 But they have very different views, rooted in the doctrine of
“rational selfishness” espoused by the hero of Saunders’s adolescence, Ayn
Rand.81 Believing both that God had endowed them with a special “trait”
to exempt them from the Sisyphean labor of gapper-brushing and that
they had made their “own luck in this world,” the Ronsens and Romos
are in a long line of Saunders’s characters who argue along the lines that
“anybody can do anything. But first they gotta try … It’s the freaking
American way—you start out in a dangerous craphole and work hard so
you can someday move to a somewhat less dangerous craphole.”82 Sid
Ronsen updates this when he urges Capable to “work harder”: “Actually
don’t work harder, work smarter. Be more efficient than you’ve ever been
before. In fact be more efficient than is physically possible. I know that’s
what I’d do.”83
On the one hand, the hyperbolic cliché of the business manual collapses
as soon as it is voiced—what does it mean to “be more efficient than is
physically possible”? On the other hand, working smarter is precisely what
the aptly named Capable goes on to do. She realizes that she will never be
able to keep her goats clean and therefore learns to fish. The story could
have ended there—as an updated version of the Russian folktale about the
little red hen who gets no help from the other farmyard animals and there-
fore declines to share her harvest with them. But Capable is also kind, and
therefore, “soon found out that it was not all that much fun being the sort
of person who eats a big dinner in a warm house while others shiver on
their roofs in the dark.” Despite the “extra work” it entails, she invites the
neighbors to dinner and then teaches them to fish for themselves.84 This
turn of events brings to mind, surely not accidentally, Lau Tzu’s motto
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and
you feed him for a lifetime,” and more generally the Taoist Principles of
10 KASIA BODDY
Oneness, Balance and Harmony. By the tale’s end, Frip has been trans-
formed: the neighbors fish side by side and even the gappers have adjusted
to the change in circumstances; with no goats “to love,” they vote to latch
themselves, harmlessly, on to fences. Only the fish lose out.
“Working together” with one’s neighbors is Saunders’s happy ending
(The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil rewrites it on a national scale),
a counter to “the human tendency to continually divide the world into
dualities.”85 “Tendency” is a keyword for Saunders and elsewhere he has
argued that it is not “systems” but the “human tendenc[ies]” that “cluster
into systems” that we need to struggle against.86 Even when we cringe
at George W. Bush’s inanities, he insists, “We are cringing at the part of
us that thinks/talks that way.”87 In theory, then, we should try not to
think of “our companies and our government and our media” as hostile
environments which oppress and exploit workers and which they must
resist—the scenario of many an early Saunders tale—but rather, he says, as
“manifestations” of qualities that exist “within us” all.88 More troubling
still for a satirist, Saunders argues against generalization and judgment; he
is so keen to “remain permanently confused” that he has even claimed to
be “in two minds” about “the consumer-criticism stuff” upon which so
much of his fiction depends: “I just see it as a feature of my culture, both
sort of horrible and sort of wonderful.”89
Remarks like these can be read in relation to Saunders’s avowed
Buddhist holism and to the interconnection of “inner and outer work”: as
Kenneth Kraft sums it up, “we must change the world, we must change
ourselves, we must change ourselves in order to change the world.”90 But
Saunders’s comments also chime with what Rachel Greenwald Smith calls
neoliberal fiction. While the liberal novel pitted “the autonomous indi-
vidual against a monolithic society,” she argues, neoliberal fiction suggests
that “attachments beyond the self” are to be valued, and not least for their
benefit to “self-development.”91
I began with a phrase that Saunders attributes to Terry Eagleton:
“capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body.” This “poetic indict-
ment,” although attributed to Eagleton, is a paraphrase by the playwright
Naomi Wallace, as quoted by Vivian Gornick in a New York Times piece.92
Eagleton himself says something a little different: “The goal of Marxism is
to restore to the body its plundered powers.”93 In other words, Eagleton
is presenting Marx’s solution to the problem of capitalism—communism.
“Only with the supersession of private property,” Eagleton explains, “will
the senses be able to come into their own. If communism is necessary,
it is because we are unable to feel, taste, smell and touch as fully as we

might.”94 Saunders is not a communist, but a self-described “Eastern lib-
eral,” and for him, the restoration of feeling, taste, smell, and touch is the
work of literature.95
“Working with Language”96

Asked by an interviewer to describe his writing process, Saunders once
offered “a cheesy dating analogy.” The kind of writer who is concerned
with “Plot, Character, Theme,” he imagined as the kind of corporate
manager, who, in order to find a mate, would create a database and con-
sider “Long-Range Age Projections and Projected Bliss Quotients at Time
of Birth of First Child, and Likely Retirement Attitudinal Deductions, and
so on.” The kind of writer who, like Saunders himself, is driven instead by
“line-by-line passion” operates more intuitively or subconsciously.97 This
kind of writer, and lover, operates “viscerally—reclaiming ‘full-body con-
trol’”—and with careful attention to the needs of their partner (whether
romantic or reader): “Specificity, precision, and brevity, applied in lan-
guage, drive us towards compassion.”98
But if well-crafted language is a way of restoring the body’s plundered
sensuality to loving consciousness, it can also be an act of resistance or
revenge. Saunders wrote his first book, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,
during the seven years, 1989–1996, that he worked for the Radian
Corporation in Rochester, New York. In a Preface written for the 2012
e-edition, he detailed all the ways in which, in order to find time to write,
he proved himself a master of what Michel de Certeau calls la perruque:
“the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer.”99 For de
Certeau, this “differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is
stolen” and “from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job”:
“La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter
on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe
to make a piece of furniture for his living room.”100
Company time is what Saunders was after, and he describes a range
of ways in which he managed to write on the clock: billing a manager an
extra half hour for a job, then spending it on his “own” writing; drafting
poems during conference calls; situating his computer “to maximize the
number of steps a curious person (a boss, for example) would have to take
to see … what was on the screen.”
12 KASIA BODDY
I wrote in the bathroom, I printed using the company printer, I turned

away from my Kodak report to jot things down, I edited while waiting for
an offsite remediation system to purge, I sometimes blew off a full afternoon
when I was feeling ripe, although usually, when that happened, I’d take
work home just to be fair.101
All of this was a means of gaining time but also (by beating the system) a
way of having fun.102 And fun turns out to be just as important as time.
Indeed, if fun is the antithesis of work for clerical office work, it turns out
to be the prerequisite for the “real” work of literary creativity.
For this reason, the seven years Saunders worked at Radian almost
constitute an alternative writing program (he took the job in 1989, after
graduating with an MFA from Syracuse the previous year). The MFA—
“an alternate economy, enclosed and complete”103—had exerted its own
kind of “narrowly careerist” corporate pressure.104 When the production
of stories was his full-time occupation, anxieties of influence (Hemingway,
Kerouac, Joyce, and Lowry) and aspirations toward “conceptual/thematic
weight” conspired to make Saunders as “tired” as any office day and to
provoke his readers (mainly his wife) to the “zero-degree aesthetic judg-
ment” of “interesting.”105 The MFA provided “some time out of the capi-
talist shitstorm” and yet the perruque of corporate life was, in turn, a kind
of liberation from school.106 “The Wavemaker Falters,” a comic tale set in
a theme park, was the first story that emerged out of Saunders’s realiza-
tion that literary labor (for it is never not labor) could be different from
both the technical report and the workshop exercise: “working on it was
fun … What a relief that was: to work with certainty, toward fun, just for
the hell of it.”107
But fun is not, Saunders concedes, the whole story. Instead, he imag-
ines an authorial pilgrim’s progress from initial “joy and confidence”
through a slough of despond that provokes the revision needed to take
the story to the celestial city of completion (and, these days, publication
in The New Yorker). In various places, he describes the process according
to a Freudian paradigm in which a parental “conscious mind” orders sub-
conscious creativity “to its room,” then “rolls up its sleeves and gets to
work” tidying up the mess.108 More relevant for my purposes, though, is
Saunders’s resort to the analogy of worker and boss. Writing a first draft,
he notes, is so productive that the writer goes into debt: “pages pile up ….
Begin spending the money you will earn for it, using credit cards.” But
the contracted work is not for “pages” but for a story with a shape and “an
end”; in other words, in order “to pay off the credit cards,” the supervi-
sor’s input is needed. “Dim, logical and loud,” that figure resembles one
of Saunders’s perennially over-demanding bosses, “insisting that you …
cease enjoying everything else in life until such time as you/he can get
this damned story done.”109 The conscious/boss’s solutions might be
“doltish,” but they nevertheless provoke the subconscious/worker to get
the job finished so that he can get paid.
Supervision (internal or not) is key to the production of a short
story.110 While the novelist, as Saunders imagines him, is like “a person
standing at one end of a people mover, with a shovel, in front of a big
pile of dirt”—feeding the dirt on “a little at a time” so the book “will
keep moving”111—“writing short stories is very hard work” of a different
kind.112 With stories, there is very little material—or dirt—to shovel, but
rather than succumb to “sloth,” what the writer mainly does is reorder, or
revise, it.113 Saunders talks about revising “extensively” and “over a long
period of time”: of making “thousands” of decisions.114 “The Semplica
Girl Diaries,” for example, took “more than a dozen years to write.”115
These “meticulous rounds of revision,” as Mark McGurl noted of Carver,
are what allows the story writer to conceive of his or her particular version
of the “writing life as an occupation, a form of labor.”116
In describing himself as someone “working through …. craft issues,”
Saunders is aligning himself with the long-standing artisanal ethos, and
economy, of short-fiction production.117 But that is not to say that he
is, therefore, exempt from the contemporary experience economy that
his stories so often describe, nor from the demands of emotional labor
and exchange. In 2013, Saunders published Tenth of December, a collec-
tion of stories that, critics noted, were “more moving and emotionally
accessible than anything that has come before.”118 Saunders himself was
forthright about his desire to be “more expansive,” to find a “way to reach
those good and dedicated readers that the first few books might not have
appealed to.” This decision could be read as a straightforward attempt to
make money—the book certainly worked in those terms, becoming an
international bestseller—but that is too cynical. For Saunders and many
of his contemporaries, the natural writerly ambition for popularity (and
sales) is intricately tied up with the desire to make an emotional con-
nection “between the writer and the reader,” to make the reader feel.119
Tenth of December has its share of theme park performances and corporate
euphemism, of poverty, hard work, and despair, but what distinguishes the
back-from-the-brink rescue stories that open (“Victory Lap”) and close
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Lucy’s safari. Lucille Ball Productions, Inc. Produced in association
with Paramount Television, a division of Paramount Pictures
Corporation. 27 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Here’s Lucy) © Desilu
Productions, Inc.; 3Mar69 (in notice: 1968); LP43571.
LP43572.
Lucy and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Lucille Ball Productions, Inc.
Lucy) © Desilu Productions, Inc.; 10Mar69 (in notice: 1968);
LP43572.
LP43573.
Lucy helps Craig get a driver’s license. Lucille Ball Productions,
Inc. Produced in association with Paramount Television, a division of
Lucy) © Desilu Productions, Inc.; 17Mar69 (in notice: 1968);
LP43573.
LP43574.
We have an addict in the house. Communications Foundation, Inc.
Produced in cooperation with Avant Association of Voluntary
Agencies on Narcotics Treatment, Inc. 33 min., sd., color, 16 mm. ©
Communications Foundation, Inc.; 4Jan73; LP43574.
LP43575.
How do I love thee? A Freeman-Enders production. 109 min., sd.,
color, 35 mm. From the novel, Let me count the ways, by Peter
DeVries. © ABC Pictures Corporation; 1Oct70; LP43575.
LP43576.
The Bootleggers. A Charles B. Pierce production. 117 min., sd.,
color, 35 mm. © Charles B. Pierce Advertising and Productions, Inc.;
18Jan74; LP43576.
LP43577.
The Effect of gamma rays on man in the moon marigolds. 101
min., sd., color, 35 mm. © Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation;
14Mar73 (in notice: 1972); LP43577.
LP43578.
Pitfall. An Alfra production. Produced in association with MGM
TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical Center) © Metro Goldwyn
Mayer, Inc.; 6Jan71 (in notice: 1970); LP43578.
LP43579.
Web of darkness. An Alfra production. Produced in association
with MGM TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical Center) © Metro
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 13Jan71 (in notice: 1970); LP43579.
LP43580.
Danger point. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
MGM TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical Center) © Metro
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 27Jan71 (in notice: 1970); LP43580.
LP43581.
Countdown. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 17Feb71 (in notice: 1970); LP43581.
LP43582.
Secret heritage. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 3Feb71; LP43582.
LP43583.
Edge of violence. An Alfra production. Produced in association
LP43584.
Perfection of vices. An Alfra production. Produced in association
LP43585.
Man in hiding. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 3Mar71; LP43585.
LP43586.
Crossroads. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 10Mar71; LP43586.
LP43587.
Brink of doom. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
MGM TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical center) © Metro
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 16Sep70; LP43587.
LP43588.
Undercurrent. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 23Sep70; LP43588.
LP43589.
Junkie. An Alfra production. Produced in association with MGM
TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical center) © Metro Goldwyn
Mayer, Inc.; 30Sep70; LP43589.
LP43590.
Assailant. An Alfra production. Produced in association with MGM
Mayer, Inc.; 7Oct70; LP43590.
LP43591.
The Clash. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 14Oct70; LP43591.
LP43592.
Ghetto clinic. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
LP43593.
Scream of silence. An Alfra production. Produced in association
with MGM TV. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (Medical center) © Metro
LP43594.
Death grip. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 4Nov70; LP43594.
LP43595.
Witch hunt. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
LP43596.
Deadly encounter. An Alfra production. Produced in association
LP43597.
Trial by terror. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
LP43598.
The Accused. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 2Dec70; LP43598.
LP43599.
Crisis. An Alfra production. Produced in association with MGM
Mayer, Inc.; 9Dec70; LP43599.
LP43600.
Man at bay. An Alfra production. Produced in association with
LP43601.
The Savage image. An Alfra production. Produced in association
LP43602.
The Don is dead. A Universal picture. 115 min., sd., color, 35 mm.
Based on the novel by Marvin H. Albert. © Universal Pictures;
14Nov73; LP43602.
LP43603.
That man Bolt. 103 min., sd., color, 35 mm. © Universal Pictures;
12Dec73; LP43603.
LP43604.
Charley Varrick. A Siegel film. 111 min., sd., color, 35 mm.,
Panavision. From the novel, The Looters, by John Reese. ©
Universal Pictures; 5Oct73; LP43604.
LP43605.
Breezy. A Malpaso Company film. 105 min., sd., color, 35 mm. ©
Universal Pictures & The Malpaso Company; 18Nov73; LP43605.
LP43606.
Kotch. A Kotch Company production, a division of Frugal Films,
Ltd. 114 min., sd., color, 35 mm. Based on the novel by Katharine
Topkins. © ABC Pictures Corporation; 30Sep71; LP43606.
LP43607.
Flossie and religion. A Filmways Television production. 26 min.,
sd., color, 16 mm. (Daddy’s girl) © Filmways Television Productions,
Inc.; 19Jun73; LP43607.
LP43608.
The Black pirate. The Boltons Trading Corporation by
arrangement with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. & Raymond Rohauer. 236
min., sd., b&w, 16 mm. NM: revision & additions. © Boltons Trading
Corporation; 2Apr74; LP43608.
LP43609.
The Spikes Gang. A Mirisch-Duo production. Produced in
association with Sanford Productions, Inc. 96 min., sd., color, 35
mm. Based on the novel, The Bank robber, by Giles Tippette. © The
Mirisch Corporation of California; 18Mar74; LP43609.
LP43610.
The Convention. A Bud Yorkin-Norman Lear Tandem production.
30 min., sd., b&w, 16 mm. (Maude) © Tandem Productions, Inc.;
26Dec72 (in notice: 1973); LP43610.
LP43611.
Grass story. A Bud Yorkin-Norman Lear Tandem production. 30
min., sd., b&w, 16 mm. (Maude) © Tandem Productions, Inc.;
28Nov72; LP43611.
LP43612.
High flying spy. Pt. 3. 60 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (The Wonderful
world of Disney, 1972–1973 series) Based on the book, High spy, by
Robert Edmond Alter. © Walt Disney Productions; 31Oct72;
LP45612.
LP43613.
Anaerobic infections. 20 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (The Upjohn
Vanguard of Medicine, no. 17) © The Upjohn Company; 2Apr74;
LP43613.
LP43614.
The Girl who ran out of night. Douglas Lloyd McIntosh. 52 min.,
sd., color, 16 mm. © Douglas Lloyd McIntosh & New York
University; 1Apr74; LP43614.
LP43615.
The Man who changed the Navy. 52 min., sd., color, 16 mm. ©
National Broadcasting Company, Inc.; 28Jan74; LP43615.
LP43616.
If that’s a gnome, this must be Zurich. 52 min., sd., color, 16 mm.
© National Broadcasting Company, Inc.; 10Dec73; LP43616.
LP43617.
It happened in Hollywood. 71 min., sd., color, 16 mm. © Bulo
Productions, Inc.; 17Jan73 (in notice: 1972); LP43617.
LP43618.
The Doberman gang. A Rosamond Productions, Inc. presentation.
87 min., sd., color, 35 mm. © Rosamond Productions, Inc.;
21May72; LP43618.
LP43619.
Hello, Mother, goodbye. 30 min., sd., color, 16 mm. © Metro
Goldwyn Mayer, Inc.; 15May74 (in notice: 1973); LP43619.
LP43620.
Shirts/skins. 30 min., sd., color, 16 mm. © Metro Goldwyn Mayer,
Inc.; 15May74; LP43620.
LP43621.
High plains drifter. Malpaso Company. 105 min., sd., color, 35
mm., Panavision. © Universal Pictures & The Malpaso Company;
29Mar73; LP43621.
LP43622.
The Naked ape. A Universal/Playboy film. 85 min., sd., color, 35
mm. Based on the book by Desmond Morris. © Universal Pictures &
Playboy Productions, Inc.; 17Aug73; LP43622.
LP43623.
Willie Dynamite. A Universal Zanuck/Brown picture. Produced in
association with Generation 70, Inc. 102 min., sd., color, 35 mm. ©
Universal Pictures; 19Dec73; LP43623.
LP43624.
American graffiti. A Lucasfilm, Ltd./Coppola Company
production. 109 min., sd., color, 35 mm. © Universal Pictures;
1Aug73; LP43624.
LP43625.
Cancel my reservation. A Naho Enterprises production. 99 min.,
sd., color, 35 mm. Based on the novel, The Broken gun, by Louis
L’Amour. © Naho Enterprises; 22Sep72; LP43625.
LP43626.
Mean streets. Taplin Perry Scorsese Productions. 112 min., sd.,
color, 35 mm. © Warner Brothers, Inc.; 14Oct73; LP43626.
LP43627.
It’s the Easter beagle, Charlie Brown. A Lee Mendelson, Bill
Melendez production. Produced in cooperation with United Feature
Syndicate, Inc. & Charles M. Schulz Creative Assoc. 30 min., sd.,
color, 16 mm. © United Feature Syndicate, Inc.; 9Apr74; LP43627.
LP43628.
Chinatown. 131 min., sd., color, 35 mm., Panavision. © Long Road
Productions; 20Jun74; LP43628.
LP43629.
The Big growl. Walter J. Klein Company, Ltd. 20 min., sd., color,
16 mm. Appl. au.: The Junior League of Charlotte, North Carolina,
Inc. © The Junior League of Charlotte, North Carolina, Inc.; 1Nov73;
LP43629.
LP43630.
Mesa trouble. A DePatie Freleng production. Produced in
association with the Mirisch Cinema Company, Inc. 7 min., sd., color,
35 mm. (Hoot Kloot) Appl. au.: United Artists Corporation. ©
United Artists Corporation; 16May74 (in notice: 1973); LP43630.
LP43631.
Saddle soap opera. A DePatie Freleng production. Produced in
United Artists Corporation; 16May74; LP43631.
LP43632.
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. A Malpaso Company film. 115 min.,
sd., color, 35 mm., Panavision. © The Malpaso Company; 22Apr74;
LP43632.
LP43633.
Mister Majestyk. Mirisch Corporation of California. 103 min., sd.,
color, 35 mm., Panavision. © The Mirisch Corporation of California;
26Mar74; LP43633.
LP43634.
Kloot’s kounty. A DePatie Freleng production. Produced in
United Artists Corporation; 19Jan73; LP43634.
LP43635.
By Hoot or by crook. A DePatie Freleng production. Produced in
United Artists Corporation; 17Apr74 (in notice: 1973); LP43635.
LP43636.
Big beef at the O. K. Corral. A DePatie Freleng production.
Produced in association with the Mirisch Cinema Company, Inc. 7
min., sd., color, 35 mm. (Hoot Kloot) Appl. au.: United Artists
Corporation. © United Artists Corporation; 17Apr74 (in notice:
1973); LP43636.
LU
REGISTRATIONS
LU3664.
Op-Op the eskimo and the igloos of OOmy. 8 min., color, 16 mm.
Appl. au.: Brian Gary Withers. © Brian Gary Withers; 14Jan74;
LU3664.
LU3665.
Sarah’s war. 23 min., sd., b&w, 16 mm. Appl. au.: Lothar Spree. ©
Lothar Spree; 21Jan74; LU3665.
LU3666.
Impulse. 90 min., sd., color, 35 mm. Appl. au.: Conqueror Films,
Inc. (Socrates Ballis, President) © Conqueror Films, Inc.; 24Jan74;
LU3666.
LU3667.
The Magic land of Mother Goose. 60 min., sd., color, 35 mm. Appl.
au.: J. Edwin Baker. © J. Edwin Baker; 20Mar74; LU3667.
LU3668.
Doctor Quik and the exchange ray. 10 min., Super 8 mm. Appl.
au.: Angelo A. DelMonte. © Angelo A. DelMonte; 4Mar74; LU3668.
LU3669.
Steppenwolf, for madmen only. 95 min. Adapted from the novel by
Hermann Hesse. Appl. au.: Produ Film Company. © Peter J.
Sprague; 25Mar74; LU3669.
LU3670.
The Dipsy Doodle show. 60 min., sd., videotape. © Storer
Broadcasting Company; 8Apr74; LU3670.
LU3671.
The Investigator. 92 min. Appl. au.: Lira Films. © Doyen
Properties Associates; 22Apr74; LU3671.
LU3672.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Rolling Stones. 6 reels, sd., color, 35
mm. © Musifilm B. V.; 19Mar74; LU3672.
LU3673.
The Liberation of Cherry Jankowski. John Russo & Russell W.
Streiner. 86 min., sd., color, 16 mm. From the novel by John Russo.
Appl. au.: New American Films, Inc. © New American Films, Inc.;
3Apr74; LU3673.
LU3674.
The Chess game. 13 min., sd., Super 8 mm. Appl. au.: Stephen P.
Hines. © Stephen P. Hines; 26Jun74; LU3674.
MP
REGISTRATIONS
MP24724.
Garner Ted Armstrong. Program 455. Ambassador College. 29
min., sd., color, videotape (3/4 inch) © Ambassador College;
21Nov73; MP24724.
MP24725.
4Nov73; MP24725.
MP24726.
7Dec73; MP24726.
MP24727.
21Nov73; MP24727.
MP24728.
24Aug73; MP24728.
MP24729.
24Aug73; MP24729.
MP24730. Garner Ted Armstrong. Program 514. Ambassador
College. 29 min., sd., color, videotape (3/4 inch) © Ambassador
College; 7Dec73; MP24730.
MP24731.
5Sep73; MP24731.
MP24732.
Functions. 4 min., si., color, 8 mm. (Calculus in motion) Appl. au.:
Bruce & Katherine Cornwell. © Houghton Mifflin Company;
15Jun73; MP24732.
MP24733.
Time Life Video speed reading system. A Daniel Wilson
production for Time Life Video. 190 min., sd., color, videotape (3/4
inch) © Time, Inc.; 15Sep72; MP24733.
MP24734.
The Alarming problem. Fire Service Extension and Film
Production Unit, Iowa State University. 14 min., sd., color, 16 mm. ©
Iowa State University a. a. d. o. Iowa State University of Science and
Technology; 3Apr73; MP24734.
MP24735.
Infant appraisal. United Cerebral Palsy Association of Santa Clara
County, United Cerebral Palsy Association of San Mateo County &
Santa Clara County Health Department. 27 min., sd., color, 16 mm.
© United Cerebral Palsy Association of Santa Clara County, Inc.;
26Dec73; MP24735.
MP24736.
Element. A film by Amy Greenfield. 12 min., si., b&w, 16 mm. ©
Amy Greenfield; 1Dec73; MP24736.
MP24737.
Hawaii — the fortunate isles. Cate and McGlone Films. 31 min.,
sd., color, 16 mm. © Cate and McGlone Films; 25Feb73; MP24737.
MP24738.
Mexican or American. An Atlantis production. 17 min., sd., color,
16 mm. Appl. au.: Bernard Selling. © Atlantis Productions, Inc.;
9Apr70; MP24738.
MP24739.
A Better life through electricity. 1 min., sd., color, 16 mm. ©
William Ditzel Productions; 30Nov72; MP24739.
MP24740.
Tribal people of Mindanao. 20 min., sd., color, 16 mm. Prev. pub.
10Dec71. NM: abridgment. © National Geographic Society; 5Dec72;
MP24740.
MP24741.
About zoos. 11 min., sd., color, 16 mm. (About) From the television
special Zoos of the world. Prev. pub. 9Sep70, MP20939. NM:
abridgment. © National Geographic Society; 16Mar73 (in notice:
1971); MP24741.
MP24742.

Textbook George Saunders Critical Essays 1St Edition Philip Coleman Ebook All Chapter PDF

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George Saunders: Critical Essays 1st

Edition Philip Coleman

John Berryman Centenary Essays Coleman

Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays 1st Edition Rayson K.

Abstractionism Essays in Philosophy of Mathematics 1st

Anesthesiology Critical Care Board Review George

The Birnbaum-Saunders Distribution 1st Edition Leiva

Culture and Cognition A Collection of Critical Essays

Twenty-First Century Marianne Moore: Essays from a

On Reasoning and Argument Essays in Informal Logic and

EDITED BY PHILIP COLEMAN,

More information about this series at

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017930700

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © Kevin Storrar

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

“The story is talking back to you,” George Saunders says in an interview

writers beside whom he is often cited, such as Flannery O’Connor, Kurt

Readers have much to look forward to from George Saunders, an

Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

Philip Coleman acknowledges the support and friendship of colleagues

1 “A Job to Do”: George Saunders on, and at, Work 1

2 Horning In: Language, Subordination and Freedom

3 Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism:

4 “Hope that, in Future, All Is well”:

5 Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland:

6 Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores,

7 Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural

8 The Absent Presence of the Deus Absconditus

9 Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction 153

10 Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary

11 Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”:

12 Everyday Zombies: Ethics and the Contemporary

13 “Third-person Ventriloquism”: Microdialogues

14 “A Little at a Time. And Iteratively”:

George Saunders: A Preliminary Bibliography 245

Notes on Contributors 267

Works Cited 273

“A Job to Do”*: George Saunders on,

George Saunders’s website features a short autobiography. Nothing

*George Saunders, “Exhortation,” in Tenth of December (London: Bloomsbury,

© The Author(s) 2017 1

“Work Work Work”3

“Do you know what we do? In our country? We work.”5

In recent years, and particularly in the wake of the financial crisis of

representative” or a memo from the “divisional director” to his staff.16

Saunders’s characters are not, in other words, unmarried college gradu-

The fact that the narrator of “Pastoralia” impersonates a caveman in order

economist Juliet Schor argues, those technologies also represented oppor-

Emotional and Bodily Labor

“What am I saying? Am I saying whistle while you work? Maybe I am.”38

For Hochschild, the main problem of emotional labor is the “emo-

“Look at the ass on that.”...

way”68—Carver’s famous figuring of the storyteller’s role69—it turns out

The Work of Kindness

“be kind to one another”74

it is because we are unable to feel, taste, smell and touch as fully as we

“Working with Language”96

I wrote in the bathroom, I printed using the company printer, I turned

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Steve Gronert Ellerhoff