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This chapter examines how the landscape of American broadcasting in the second half of the twentieth century evolved from a situation in which values of liberal independence acted as a front for the sway of network corporations to one in which the incremental fragmentation of the increasingly global media market posed a challenge to the rhetoric of national space. It considers how the spatial dynamics inherent within American culture have been represented in American writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Don DeLillo, and contrasts this with the perspectives of a younger generation, in particular those of David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers. It explains how the “Voice of America” (VOA), the official radio and television service of the U.S. federal government, became “the nation's ideological arm of anti-communism,” while the minds of supposedly free-thinking citizens at home were also shaped surreptitiously by the new power of electronic media.

This chapter argues that neo-abolitionism uses sentimentalism to dehistoricize contemporary atrocities, viewing them as revivals of a superseded Atlantic past. Modern slave narratives, explicitly written to abolish modern slavery across the globe (ranging across Sudan, Haiti, and Sierra Leone, promoted by various neo-abolitionist organizations), enshrine the language of sentimentalism as the most effective weapon in the human rights arsenal, defining a global relation between us and them solely as a matter of sentiment. Survivors outline an idyllic childhood, abduction and captivity, a life of servitude, until the moment of humanitarian rescue and a new life in America. Reading Francis Bok’s memoir Escape from Slavery (2003) alongside Dave Eggers’s neoliberal novel What Is the What (2006), I trace how the formal exchanges among subject, author, and amanuensis generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity.

What cultural products make it back to the US from the Middle East and North Africa in the present? This epilogue discusses the peristence of Orientalism in the contemporary US--focusing on the TV serials Homeland, Tyrant, the graphic novel Habibi by Craig Thompson, and the novels of Dave Eggers.

This chapter discusses Abdulrahman Zeitoun’s Katrina narrative, the subject of Zeitoun, Dave Eggers’ non-fiction bestseller. The story was first shared as a public blog by Mr. Zeitoun, then interview versions were published in Billy Sothern’s Down in New Orleans and in Voices from the Storm, edited by Lola Vollen and Chris Ying. Ultimately, Dave Eggers presents Zeitoun as a folk hero—an immigrant turned self-made businessman who steps up when disaster strikes—so when Zeitoun faces wrongful incarceration partly due to Islamophobia in Katrina’s wake, readers feel outraged. The public response to Zeitoun is complicated, though, by later criminal charges against him of domestic assault. Despite Abdulrahman’s early involvement in narrating his story, when it comes to Zeitoun, the survivor’s engagement with the narration is absent, and the result is a dangerously one-sided picture.

This chapter examines some of Dave Eggers's works, beginning with his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The title of the memoir brings two assumptions into sharp relation: that we want to read about suffering and that writerly genius manifests itself in the evocation of suffering. This chapter considers whether A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is actually about celebrity, or whether it is that a thirst for celebrity is the form that a certain kind of youthful vitality inevitably takes in the United States. It also offers a reading of Eggers's first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (2002), in which he invents a schematic collision between monomania and altruism. Finally, it discusses Eggers's two extended polemical essays, Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers and Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, along with his three novels: What Is the What (2006), The Wild Things (2009), and Zeitoun (2009).

Falvey contrasts critical work on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with its role at the epicentre of a series of intermedial adaptations, including Jonze and Dave Eggers’ screenplay, Eggers’ novel The Wild Things and, chiefly, Jonze’s 2009 film. The chapter observes how critical frameworks used to explore the novel’s conceptualization of child psychology can be mapped onto Jonze’s story and his aesthetics; Falvey details Jonze’s exploration of the shifting spaces of identity, existence and nature using filmic means.

This chapter explores the question of marketing and the writer-run press by comparing Hogarth Press and McSweeney's, in terms of their constructions of cultural value, readership, and authorial signature. Through an extended comparative analysis of the Hogarth Press and McSweeney's, the chapter highlights the afterlife of historical modernist values as embodied by the strategies that author-publishers have adopted both then and now; author-run presses as an expression of the writers' conceptualization of readers; and whether recent work on “reading class” versus “reading culture” can afford literary critics a supplementary means of understanding the ongoing significance of adopting modernist modes of presenting value and prescribing frameworks of expectations. It also considers the dual role of Virginia Woolf and Dave Eggers as authors and publishers.

This chapter argues that reality TV is inherently confessional—and quite aware of being so. Against a scholarly tradition of seeing fly-on-the-wall “surveillance” footage as the genre’s defining feature, this chapter shows how direct-to-camera “confession booth” monologues form the true backbone of the genre. The argument centers around a deep study of the debut season of MTV’s The Real World (1992), but it also places this program in the context of later American reality TV and in a TV tradition that stretches back to PBS’s “drama-documentary” An American Family (1973). In order to illuminate the cultural mythos that surrounded The Real World and to capture elusive qualities of its affect and aesthetic, this chapter also treats the film Reality Bites (1994) and Dave Eggers’s memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) as works of criticism with something important to say about reality TV. In the course of exploring the complex nature of confession on The Real World, special attention is paid to The Real World’s editing aesthetic and to its troubled attempts to define what its cast members do as something other than performance, other than labor.