Mark Seltzer's career-long interest in the relations binding narrative form, collective psychology, and power relations achieves a sleek, elegant crescendo with The Official World. The study works through interrelated chapters that proffer theoretical claims with sophisticated readings involving modernism and modernity. Though its critical touchstones belong to more recent theoretical discussions (as they have become assimilated into the anglophone academy), the monograph recalls a slightly older phase of literary and cultural criticism that smoothly interlaced argument and style of exposition. In particular, The Official World can be seen as an interlocutor with D. A. Miller's The Novel and the Police (1988), especially as Patricia Highsmith's Ripley tales are often the cornerstone for Seltzer's readings. Miller's collection of essays is widely seen as having reshaped Victorian studies with its deployment of Americanized Foucauldian criticism about the disciplinary construction of interiority and the role of the novel in constructing a decentralized institutional apparatus that pulses power relations through the socialized body. Miller's suspicion about the production of sensation was later implicitly challenged in literary studies by the revaluation of Gothic and sentimental works, often through affect studies, which presented emotional relays in a more admiring light. The post-Miller criticism consequently saw affect as more progressive in its politics, especially as affect studies rarely troubled itself with the ways in which populist affect could be marshalled and incorporated with right-wing movements and post-rational politics. Miller's approach exemplified a hermeneutic perspective that has likewise come under criticism in ways exemplified by Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (2015). Felski leads a charge against context-oriented criticism, a perspective that for her includes otherwise disparate schools of thought, from cultural materialism to New Historicism, and sometimes paradoxically seems to suggest that queer theory has its own subterranean links to the form of patriarchal discourse now colloquially called man-splaining.

One way to approach The Official World, then, is as a monograph that threads the needle between work from the late 1980s and early 1990s and contemporary skirmishes in the field. Seltzer does so by making three “general premises.” First, that “a modern world comes to itself by staging its own conditions, it must consist both of itself and its self-description, denotation or registration” (6). A “modern society” is modern to the degree that it provides curatorial self-reporting. Second, the modern world is “official” insofar as the

Lastly, “the model for this self-staging world is then the modern work of art” (7). Seltzer's vision of the modern world is the creation of what he calls isotopias (17): self-enclosed spaces that take their own self-reporting to be that which needs reporting on in the first place, a gesture he sees replicated in the academic world of conference celebrity and hyper-citation. The turn from realism to modernism, then, is characterized by the shift from highlighting objective social conditions to highlighting the role of the institutional commentator, the “official.” Seltzer moves on from Miller by lessening the focus on Foucauldian matters of class control through the construction of “case studies” and dossier reports. Yet he functionally dissents from Felski by continuing to be interested in the role of literary studies as illuminating matters of social force.

Readers who have a working familiarity with Niklas Luhmann and Peter Sloterdijk will find The Official World’s commentaries deeply resonant. For those less versed in these writers, Selzter's study provides one of the best illustrations of the ways in which the above approaches can be utilized for literary and cultural studies. Although the work is not explicitly located within American studies, The Official World’s primary use of evidentiary materials from the United States makes it easily understood as such, even if the critical discussions staged therein are not often situated as central to the field's self-perception, either within or beyond the host nation. A pleasure to read, The Official World deserves to be seen as a state-of-the-art study.