“Kind of Magic Back Here”: Gardening and Human Limitations in George Saunders’s “The Semplica Girl Diaries”

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-2021

Keywords

George Saunders, Semplica Girl, spiritual, Christian, Buddhist

Abstract

Previous scholars have noted George Saunders’s interest in critiquing American consumerist mentality and satirizing corporate ethics. A smaller number have studied Saunders’s interest in the human experience as defined through a spiritual quest. The material and spiritual collide in this essay, which studies Saunders’s use of the Semplica Girls, in “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” to embody an intersection between our human limitations and our responses to those limitations through material, aesthetic, and spiritual avenues.

Journal Title

Christianity & Literature

Volume

70

Issue

1

First Page

52

Last Page

67

First Department

English

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