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3 Adding to my surprise regarding the silence surrounding gender is the fact that In Persuasion Nati (.)ģTake for example Saunders’s first collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.

As Gillian Elizabeth Moore notes, “George Saunders’s persistent focus on the lived experiences of male white working-class US citizens” (59). Admittedly, Rando’s article considers gender briefly as it intersects with class in the story “Sea Oak,” but by and large the criticism on Saunders has been silent on the issue of gender, in spite of his fiction being inarguably about men: the majority of his stories are narrated by men, his protagonists and antagonists are overwhelmingly male, and women (often in the form of the protagonists’ wives) are regularly absent or silent, or when they are present, they more often than not serve as foils to their more virtuous but hen-pecked husbands. What I find surprising, however, is the lack of discussion regarding gender-and masculinity, in particular-in response to Saunders’s fiction.

David Huebert, for example, classifies several of Saunders’s stories as examples of “biopolitical dystopia,” a genre he describes as taking “place in spaces of carceral and corporeal confinement, often brought about by poverty” (106), while Juliana Nalerio-to quote her article’s title-is interested in “Class Consciousness, Violence, and Dystopia in George Saunders’ Vision of Contemporary America.”ĢConsidering Saunders’s oeuvre, it is unsurprising that critics have tended to focus on empathy and affect, satire and social critique, his fiction as dystopia, or some combination thereof.

Relatedly, other critics are concerned with Saunders’s work as dystopian fiction. Rando’s “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class” and Richard Lee’s “Narrative Point of View, Irony and Cultural Criticism in Selected Short Fiction by George Saunders” offer two examples. As both this excerpt and the title of Neeper’s article suggest, critics (as well as reviewers) tend to categorize Saunders as a satirist, 2 and much of the published criticism on Saunders adumbrates the ways in which his fiction critiques contemporary America-David P. We can also look to Michael Basseler’s article “Narrative Empathy in George Saunders’s Short Fiction” or Layne Neeper’s “‘To Soften the Heart’: George Saunders, Postmodern Satire, and Empathy,” the latter of which claims that “Saunders’s postmodern fiction serves as the exemplar for early twenty-first-century American satire’s new attention to affect-to empathy” (282). Alex Millen, for instance, is interested in “why certain affective registers in Saunders’s fiction seem to strike readers today with particular salience and emotional force” (128). 2 In an early review of Saunders’s debut collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, for instance, Michi (.)ġWhen approaching the work of George Saunders, scholars have tended to focus on the author’s calls for empathy, situating him within the New Sincerity movement 1 and interrogating the emotional affect generated by his work.1 For more on the New Sincerity movement see Kelly’s essays.