Understanding Dave Eggers

Timothy W. Galow

Description

Understanding Dave Eggers surveys the work of one of the most celebrated American authors of the twenty-first century and is the first book-length study incorporating Eggers's novels, short-story collections, and film scripts. With a style aimed at students and general readers alike, Timothy W. Galow offers a textual analysis that uniquely combines Eggers's early autobiographical works and the subject of celebrity as well as his later texts that deal with humanitarian issues.

Galow devotes a chapter to each of Eggers's major works, from his first book, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, though his recent novel, A Hologram for the King, a National Book Award finalist about an aging American businessman chasing success in Saudi Arabia. Other chapters cover You Shall Know Our Velocity, What Is the What, and Zeitoun.

Each chapter studies the major themes and styles of the featured work while also placing it in the context of Eggers's oeuvre. In this way Galow examines each text in its own right, but he also offers us a larger guide to all of Egger's work. Providing important historical background for understanding Eggers's literary work, Galow examines how Eggers's texts are deeply invested in both his own public persona and the changing cultural conditions in the United States over the past twenty years.

Galow's careful analysis is conveyed in clear language that engages issues important to contemporary critics without being pedantic or jargon laden. As a result Understanding Dave Eggers can serve as a useful introduction to the author's work or a valuable resource for the devoted reader.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Jefe
• América
• Voice of Witness
• Mr.
• Zeitoun (book)
• Deb Olin Unferth
• Gary Krist (writer)
• Of Education
• Lucky Child
• Supervisor
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Originality
• General officer
• Chivalry
• David Foster Wallace
• General
• American
• Dave Eggers
• Anecdote
• J. D. Salinger
• MR
• Mark Twain
• Sam Mendes
• Arthur Miller
• Civilization

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 12 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611174281
• Langue: English

Extrait

UNDERSTANDING
DAVE EGGERS
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
Volumes on
Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster
Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats
Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle
Truman Capote | Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell
Chicano Literature | Contemporary American Drama
Contemporary American Horror Fiction
Contemporary American Literary Theory
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926-1970
Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970-2000
Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Philip K. Dick
James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Dave Eggers
John Gardner | George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller
Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy | David Henry Hwang
John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson | Diane Johnson
Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid
Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin | Denise Levertov
Bernard Malamud | David Mamet | Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann
Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle | Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin
Arthur Miller | Stephen Millhauser | Lorrie Moore | Toni Morrison s Fiction
Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor | Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O Brien
Flannery O Connor | Cynthia Ozick | Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy
Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers | Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx
Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton
Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon
Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford
Robert Stone | Anne Tyler | Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty
Edmund White | Colson Whitehead | Tennessee Williams
August Wilson | Charles Wright
UNDERSTANDING
DAVE EGGERS
Timothy W. Galow
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Galow, Timothy W.
Understanding Dave Eggers / Timothy W. Galow.
pages cm. - (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-427-4 (hardback) - ISBN 978-1-61117-428-1 (ebook)
1. Eggers, Dave-Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS3605.G48Z76 2014
813 .6-dc23
2014023116
Jacket illustration by Ellen Fishburne Triplett http://fishburnearts.wordpress.com
For Amy
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Chapter 1 Understanding Dave Eggers
Chapter 2 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Chapter 3 You Shall Know Our Velocity
Chapter 4 What Is the What
Chapter 5 Zeitoun
Chapter 6 Short Stories, Short Short Stories, and Films
Chapter 7 A Hologram for the King
Afterword: The Circle
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
CHAPTER 1
Understanding Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers rose to national prominence in 2000 with the publication of his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius . The work, which the Times of London subsequently cited as one of the fifteen best books of the decade, quickly became a best seller and inspired a range of conversations about the author, postmodernism, and the state of literature in the twenty-first century. 1 Over the next decade, Eggers s works consistently climbed the best-seller lists and garnered nominations for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. For his literary and extraliterary endeavors, he has also received honors as various as the Heinz Award for outstanding contributions to the Arts and Humanities (which comes with a $250,000 cash prize), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the National Book Foundation s Literarian Award.
The film industry has helped to expand Eggers s renown, particularly in recent years. The film rights for Eggers s first two books were sold in 2002 and 2007, respectively, but the first film bearing his moniker did not appear until he wrote an original screenplay with his wife, Vendela Vida. Away We Go , a comedy about a couple looking for the ideal place to raise their first child, appeared in the summer of 2009, just a few months before Eggers s adaptation of Maurice Sendak s Where the Wild Things Are was released. More recently, Eggers s stories have been adapted for Gus Van Sant ( Promised Land , 2012) and Jonathan Demme ( Zeitoun , currently scheduled for a 2014 release).
Despite or perhaps in part because of Eggers s growing cultural prominence, his work has generated widely divergent responses in popular and critical circles. For some, Eggers s experimental bent and progressive activities make him a literary icon, a figure rightfully included in The Outlaw Bible of American Literature . A group of critics at the Utne Reader , to give just one example, named Eggers one of 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World. 2 Others see him as an ardent self-promoter whose public persona is a calculated fa ade. From this perspective, Eggers s string of awards and nominations is less a sign of some unique talent than it is a product of his popularity or, in a more extreme form of the argument, the literary establishment s insularity. The Underground Literary Alliance, a group of writers and critics who claim to be committed to exposing corruption in the publishing industry, had a brief (though periodically revisited) exchange with the author early in his career. 3
Debates about Eggers s true commitments have only been exacerbated by his literary texts, which often interrogate the boundaries between fiction, memoir, and biography. Debates around his third major work, What Is the What (2006), have been particularly heated. In the book, Eggers retells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the Sudanese civil war that raged throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The story, which emerged out of discussions between Deng and Eggers, is told in the first person. The work, however, is not just a mediated autobiography. Eggers freely admits inventing characters and events in the book, and he claims to have significantly altered the chronology for narrative effect. Some critics have found the postmodern underpinnings of the book a powerful way to convey horrors that might otherwise be incommunicable. The author Gary Krist has called the book extraordinary and claims that the unusual form yields a document that-unlike so many real autobiographies-exudes authenticity. It is worth noting that even in this positive review, Krist couches his praise in terms of Eggers s supposedly enormous ego: the secret of the book s credibility lies in its author s success at excising his own oversized personality from the narrative. 4
Many others have disagreed. Perhaps the most vociferous attack on What Is the What has come from the cultural critic Lee Seigel, who claims that the book s innocent expropriation of another man s identity is a post-colonial arrogance. 5 To back up this charge, he says, the eerie, slightly sickening quality about What Is the What is that Deng s personhood has been displaced by someone else s style and sensibility-by someone else s story. Deng survived his would-be killers in the Sudan, only to have his identity erased here. 6
The tenor of these claims suggests something of the passion that Eggers has inspired in both his fans and his detractors. Debates about Eggers s personality, his literary politics, and his aesthetics have become so entrenched that even his first avowedly fictional book, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (2002), is often read as a thinly veiled autobiography. The literary scholar Sarah Brouillette reads the novel as a text about Egg