Titlebook: George Saunders; Critical Essays Philip Coleman,Steve Gronert Ellerhoff Book 2017 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 Geor

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Hanging by a Thread in the Homeland: The , of George Saunders, selections from his collected fiction and essays. Saunders has noted in interviews that fiction can speak effectively to issues of alienation, disconnection and anxiety in contemporary American culture, and this essay scaffolds and examines that insight. Analysis of the discursive power—and semanti

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,Biopolitical Dystopias, Bureaucratic Carnivores, Synthetic Primitives: “Pastoralia” as Human Zoo, theoretical ground laid by posthumanism and animal studies, I argue that Saunders’s human zoodystopia productively and parodically unsettles modern conceptions of meat-eating, evolution, and species identity. I begin by outlining a particular mode of Saunders’s fiction, the “biopolitical dystopia,”

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,Ghosts and Theme Parks: The Supernatural and the Artificial in George Saunders’s Short Stories,anady, and Fredric Jameson. Though Saunders does not have the double consciousness of many authors of magical realist fiction, his stories include both the supernatural marvels of traditional culture and the artificial marvels of contemporary culture, which provide the conflicting codes necessary to

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,Cruel Inventions: George Saunders’s Literary Darkenfloxx?, dominant view, this essay explores the shock tactics on which Saunders often relies to impose his moral message on the reader. The essay questions his decidedly post-9/11 idea of a story as a black box in which the reader’s mind is altered by any means necessary—a metaphor that comes alarmingly clo

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,Dreaming and Realizing “The Semplica Girl Diaries”: A Post-Jungian Reading, with a dream. Even its form, a diary taken up to explain what life is like to future generations, lends writer and reader alike the chance to pearl over the baffling image of the living lawn ornament Semplica Girls. In Jungian terms Saunders’s dream is considered a “big dream,” one that begs consci