Short story

Communication effectuée le 15 mai 2010, dans le cadre du Séminaire Pierre Loti, sous la direction de Sophie Basch et Pierre Dupont.
Avec la participation de Suzanne Lafont, Sarga Moussa et Gaultier Roux.
Centre de Recherches sur les Poétiques du XIXe siècle (CRP19). Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III).

This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.

“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University

“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin

"The Unknown Painter" is an antislavery short story that first appeared in the mid-1830s.  Its author, original place of publication, and date remain undetermined.  It concerns the Spanish artist Bartoleme Esteban Murillo and his black slave, the painter Sebastian Gomez.  This paper analyzes the nineteenth-century publication history of the story, its translation, and the ideologies of its revisions and republications.  The analysis pays particular attention to racial content, its revision in Frederick Douglass' Paper, the zombie sub-theme, and translations.

Cuban culture has long been available to English speakers via translation. This study examines the complex ways in which English renderings of Cuban texts from various domains—poetry, science fiction, political and military writing, music, film—have represented, reshaped, or amended original texts. Taking in a broad corpus, it becomes clear that the mental image an Anglophone audience has formed of Cuban culture since 1959 depends heavily on the decisions of translators. At times, a clear ideological agenda drives moves like strengthening the denunciatory tone of a song or excising passages from a political text. At other moments, translators’ indifference to the importance of certain facets of a work, such as a film’s onscreen text or the lyrics sung on a musical performance, impoverishes the English speaker’s experience of the rich weave of self-expression in the original Spanish. In addition to the dynamics at work in the choices translators make at the level of the text itself, this study attends to how paratexts like prefaces, footnotes, liner notes, and promotional copy shape the audience’s experience of the text.

Swimming in the waters a half hour drive from Hermione's house, Hermione found some special seashells. She thought they were remarkably different from regular ones, in that these sparkled and transmitted coloured reflections from the sunshine. She didn't know what they were so she went to her magical and rare nature objects book she had found in the library one night looking for an antidote to mild insomnia. After reading from it she found out these shells, when woven with silk thread gave the owners the ability to turn into a mermaid. " Enchanting, " she thought, " this could give me something to do all summer long away from Hogwarts. She found some silk from one of her dresses and unwound it, poking small holes into the seashells and threading them onto the string. By midday on the beach she dove into the water. As soon as she entered the water, her legs felt gooey and they shut together like magnets and her waist began to tingle, slowly turning into a long scaly green skin with a tail and fins. While with her legs, she had only been able to swim the shore without the waves tackling her. Now she was able to ride the waves and swim deep underground.

My article proposes to analyse a series of short stories written by Arthur Machen in 1894 and 1895. Those stories can all be categorised under the “crime fiction” or “detective fiction” label, as their main protagonist is the amateur detective Dyson, who is confronted to various weird phenomena which will lead the hero down the paths of occultism and magic. As a result, Machen both borrows from the rules of 19th-century detective fiction as inaugurated by Poe and his famous Dupin, and at the same time distances himself from the genre mainly through the supernatural and occult elements that work at the core of the plots. Rational thinking clashes with the existence of paranormal phenomena and strongly jeopardises usual techniques of ratiocination. Indeed, as occultism is the vehicle for many of the crimes investigated by the detective, Dyson will have no choice but to dabble with the dark discipline in order to understand and try to solve the mysteries at play. Consequently, will the supernatural thwart the investigation or will it give special insight to the detective? Keeping in mind that occultism concerns that which is hidden (from the Latin occulere: to conceal), how can it work alongside the task of detection, whose goal is precisely to reveal and to explain the workings of mystery? As well as analysing the presence of occultism in the diegesis of the stories – both in the crimes perpetrated and in the investigative techniques developed by Dyson – my article will also seek to establish how occultism can be seen as a deliberate tool for the writer. Indeed, on the extra-textual level itself, the narratives also work as occult works in which Machen uses fragmentary viewpoints and a multi-layered narration in combination with horror and magic, always playing with the readers by giving them a partial description of events, particularly in the tour de force The Three Impostors. Occultism thus works as a literal motif and a metatextual symbol in all those stories, ultimately leading to the failure of the detective. Corpus under study: “The Inmost Light” (1894), “The Shining Pyramid” (1895), “The Red Hand” (1895), and The Three Impostors (1895) (which includes “Prologue”, “Adventure of the Gold Tiberius”, “The Encounter of the Pavement”, “Novel of the Dark Valley”, “Adventure of the Missing Brother”, “Novel of the Black Seal”, “Incident of the Private Bar”, “The Decorative Imagination”, “Novel of the Iron Maid”, “The Recluse of Bayswater”, “Novel of the White Powder”, “Strange Occurrence in Clerkenwell”, “History of the Young Man with Spectacles”, and “Adventure of the Deserted Residence”).

Yo en el Otro: Wifredo Lam, Gabriel García Márquez & “The Last Journey of the Ghost Ship” (Notes concerning the spiritual in the Art of the Caribbean) is an interpretation of the Caribbean and its Art, based on Kandinsky's analyses on forms and colours (Du Spirituel dans l’art , Concerning the spiritual in art, 1912). It's also a personal celebration of Kandinsky at 150.
" Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur." -Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta
" Indeed, all the arts which are relevant to humanity have a certain common bond, and are connected, one to another, by a sort of, as it were, kindred relationship." Cicero

Literature & Lithography
(Notes concerning the spiritual in the Art of the Caribbean) Yo en el Otro (the Inner Voice) /dedicated to Chinolope /
  / special thanks to Eskil Lam, for his great help on this project
ABSTRACT
                    “…we must live imaginatively." – Wifredo Lam

The Italian edition of the work by Eleazar M. Meletinsky on the historical poetics of the novella – recently edited and translated by M. Bonafin and L. Sestri ‒ gives us the opportunity to revise the theoretical model by which the Russian scholar explained the origins of this narrative genre in Europe and Asia from various folkloric forms, i.e. myth, fairy and realistic tale, anecdote: in particular the analysis is carried out through the comparison with the similar reflections on novel and epic available in other Meletinsky’s books and with the theory of the “converging streams” developed by A.N. Veselovsky. Some corrections to the model of historical poetics are proposed, in order to conciliate typology and contingent elements, poetics and philology.

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Damir Feigel, primorski pisec humoristične proze, ki je največ ustvarjal v obdobju med dvema vojnama, je s stališča slovenske literarne zgodovine nedvomno obrobni avtor. Podobno je z njegovo prisotnostjo v slovenskih srednješolskih berilih, saj so se odlomki iz Feiglovih leposlovnih besedil pojavili le v zamejskih berilih, in sicer najprej v Budalovem Slovenskem cvetniku leta 1928, po drugi vojni pa še v Čekutovi Slovenski čitanki leta 1947 in v Slovenski čitanki za II. razred Mare Blažina s sodelavci leta 1948. V zadnjih desetletjih se povečuje zanimanje za Feigla kot pisca pustolovske, znanstvenofantastične in humoristične proze. Vsekakor pa je premalo ovrednotena vloga njegove humoristične literature v obdobju fašizma, ko je podobno kot širše znani France Bevk pomagal ohranjati slovensko pisano besedo in s tehniko prikritega sporočila spodbujal nacionalno zavest.

This film belongs to a long tradition of 'moment of death' narratives, including Robert Enrico's 1961 adaptation of 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' ([1890] 2011) by Ambrose Bierce. The article will discuss how these narratives engage with time and mortality, and how they are compelled to return to an Edenic moment in the dying character's past.

"Siempre vertiginosos, siempre implacables en la voluntad de llevar a sus personajes al abismo o dejarlos colgados del borde, los relatos de este volumen (nueve, por cierto, como aquellos muy memorables de Salinger) son pequeñas ratoneras exactas y temibles. Pletórica de referencias pop y también de observaciones agudas sobre la realidad, la prosa de Josué Sánchez traza una serie de tramas crispadas alrededor de un puñado de obsesiones irrenunciables: la comida como escondite, diálogo o lucha, pero también el divorcio, el abandono, la maldita soledad.

No se trata del hambre es un libro memorable que abre el apetito para leer más". Antonio Ortuño

During the last two decades, Jīn Xuĕfēi, who goes under the pen–name of Ha Jin, has emerged as one of the most prominent Asian–American writers in America, with works in fiction, poetry and essays dealing with the Chinese experience in China and the U.S. Born in 1956 in the Chinese province of Liaoning, Ha Jin’s life has been strongly marked by po- litical and sociological events occurring in contemporary China. His father was an officer in the Red Army who was transferred around various provinces for years. This continuous change of residence gave young Jin the opportunity to discover remote regions, meet people and get acquainted with Chinese traditions and customs.
Ha Jin was ten years old when Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, which aimed at removing capitalism and Chinese traditions by way of the strict implementation of communism. Colleges were closed for ten years and many young people became Red Guards, an armed revolutionary youth organization aiming to eradicate the ‘four Olds’ – Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits and Old Ideas – which were described as anti– proletarian. At the age of thirteen, Ha Jin joined the People’s Liberation Army as a way of leaving home as he declared in different interviews (Gardner 2000; Weinberger, 2007; Fay 2009). While in the army, he worked as a telegrapher, a post which allowed him some free time to read literature and educate himself.
He left the army in 1975 and worked for three years in a railway company. In 1977 colleges reopened in China and, a year later, Ha Jin began his studies at Heilongjiang University where he earned a B.A. in English in 1981. He then decided to pursue his studies in Anglo–American literature at Shandong University, where he received his M.A. in 1984. A year later, he won a scholarship to study American literature at Brandeis University, from which he earned a Ph.D. in English in 1993. While he was at Brandeis, Jin saw on television the Tiananmen Square massacre, an incident which split his life in two: along with his wife, he decided to remain in the U.S. as a refugee. This political incident made him realize he could never go back to China and teach in a state–controlled educational system. After a series of odd jobs, Ha Jin was offered a teaching position at Emory University. Later on, he moved to Boston University where he currently teaches literature and creative writing.
His literary career began with the publication of poetry: Between Silences (1990) and Facing Shadows (1996). He soon turned to short fiction, a genre which Ha Jin claimed he feels more at home with than with any other (Fay 2009). To date, he has published four collections of short stories: Ocean of Words (1996), 􏰀n􏰁er the 􏰂e􏰁 􏰃lag (1997) – for which he received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction –, The Bridegroom (2000) and A 􏰄oo􏰁 􏰃all (2009). He has also published six novels, among which are the critical- ly–aclaimed Waiting (1999), awarded with the National Book Award for Fiction in 1999 and War Trash (2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest novel to date, Nanjing Requiem (2011), is a fictional account based on a historical episode, the Rape of Nanking, a mass murder that ocurred following the capture of this city by Japanese troops in 1937. A Map of Betrayal, a novel set in the U.S., is scheduled for its release on 4th November 2014. Interest in his works is evinced by the number of studies dealing with the immigrant experience (Juncker 2010; Kong 2012), the transnational identity (Marting 2011), or the bilingual creativity (Zhang 2002; Gong 2014) of his fiction.
Initially, Ha Jin did not consider the idea of becoming a writer as his main goal was to work as a translator. He knows that writing in English, though viewed as a betrayal of his mother tongue by many Chinese (Fay 2009), was his only option if he wanted to have his books published after the banning of the majority of his oeuvre in China. His fiction has been described as harsh, marked by a subtle fierce irony, his male characters finding themselves in precarious situations, harassed by either Chinese authorities or the grim conditions they experience when living in the United States.
As many others, this interview took place in Ha Jin’s office at Boston University. What follows is an edited transcript of our talk recorded by the interviewer, with the kind per- mission of the author. However, due to time constraints, several questions were answered via e–mail exchange.

A flash fiction collection featuring 100 short-short horror stories.

“The impact of each of these devastating tales is incredible, out of proportion to the brevity of the story…This book is like a little gift, each page revealing a new present, a mini-story told with more flair and style than most novels.”
—Verbicide

More information: http://gorelets.com/books/100-jolts-shockingly-short-stories/

Behnāz Alipour Gaskari has purposefully and deliberately used post-modern techniques in the title, the content and the style of narrative in her short story collection called “Bemānd…”. Recursive structures, short junctions, setting and disrupting frameworks, confusion and lack of coherence in text, contradiction and uncertainty are all the post-modernist techniques have been used in the stories; however the use of recursive structure is more noticeable. Creating several different narrative levels or fictional world in addition to the ontological content of the stories, recursive structure shows the artificiality of them highlighting the fictional framework. The author expresses her own opinion about women issues using the above mentioned worlds. She had worked totally different in two stories. Using the sleep-expressing technique, she creates, in the story of “Bādhāie Ke az Hindukush Mivazand” (The winds blow from the Hindu Kush), an imagery world besides the semi-real world; and shows herself in the story of “Zany Az Jense Mes”(A woman of Copper) and  shows her authority and the artificiality of the story pointing directly to the writing. Using the post-modern techniques by the author to express the problems of women in modern society shows that post-modernism is a narrative tool rather than a method or school of thought.

These are the endorsements that appear on the covers of Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, University of Toronto Press 2019, from Lesley Clement (author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction); W.H. New (Critic, Editor, Writer); Winfried Siemerling (author of The New North American Studies and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered); Robert Thacker (author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, a Biography);  and Aritha van Herk (Writer, Editor, Speaker).

A narrativa transmídia é a forma de entretenimento contemporâneo por excelência. O seu planejamento estratégico ganhou uma maior importância, principalmente com a disseminação em larga escala de conteúdo audiovisual sob demanda, que se estende por múltiplas plataformas. Ao proporcionar o compartilhamento de experiências e imersão nos mundos de histórias criados, as narrativas transmídia atendem as demandas da 'cultura da conexão' – na qual a diversidade conteúdos audiovisuais favorece a concentração de redes discursivas horizontais, que estimulam a participação dos usuários. Neste cenário, a produção audiovisual sofre o impacto das incertezas, justificadas por mudanças que alteram a rotina de trabalho e os sistemas de produção. A flexibilização da produção audiovisual e o incremento de novas plataformas de distribuição e exibição, geram demandas por novos conteúdos e programações. A pressão para a criação de conteúdo transmidiático nasce na elaboração da bíblia de produção, visando à criação de um ecossistema de negócios para exploração da propriedade intelectual (IP-Intelectual Property) e pela evolução tecnológica, que devido aos avanços constantes, induz a uma maior produção de conteúdo multiplataforma. Outra fonte de pressão, estratégica para o futuro do entretenimento transmídia, consiste em atender os desejos das novas audiências por histórias mais longas, com maior número de personagens e que possuam universos narrativos mais complexos. Neste sentido, a prática de roteirização de projetos transmídia consiste na criação de um mundo de história, desdobrado em diferentes plataformas. Neste modelo de roteirização, as audiências interagem por meio das múltiplas telas, de forma integrada, experienciando a imersão em realidades ficcionais. Deste modo, os conteúdos circulados em diferentes mídias e plataformas cativam as audiências e geram receitas. Neste processo, o mundo da história é desenvolvido de forma independente da mídia ou do formato, mas é testada com audiências reais nas mídias e plataformas sociais. Para o produtor e roteirista transmídia português, Nuno Bernardo, um dos maiores equívocos da indústria do entretenimento talvez seja considerar " que as pessoas compram conteúdo quando, na verdade, nós compramos experiências. Nós compramos o contexto " (BERNARDO, 2014, 48%). As novas estratégias de roteirização consideram a participação das audiências e levam em consideração a capacidade dos usuários de produzir e distribuir conteúdo, além de interagirem em tempo real. Nesta perspectiva, a produção de bíblias transmídia é na maioria dos casos o planejamento estratégico do mundo da história, levando em consideração a audiência, com o objetivo de recompensar as demandas de uma mídia em especifico. Neste caso, o usuário vai se sentir recompensado e encorajado a fazer novos investimentos, seguindo os desdobramentos da história em diferentes mídias com o objetivo de aumentar o seu repertório de conhecimentos. Neste contexto, a produção de bíblias transmídia se tornou um objeto de estudos recente para os pesquisadores. Este capítulo procura analisar as características que se destacam no processo de roteirização de projetos transmídias, a partir dos estudos sobre a dramaturgia audiovisual seriada. O estudo será realizado considerando os métodos de roteirização para mídias convencionais, com o objetivo de analisar a experiência de imersão no mundo de história e os espaços criados para a participação dos usuários. 2. Dramaturgia audiovisual seriada As narrativas transmídia estabelecem relações estruturais com as formas seriadas de longa duração (a forma épica), pois representam possibilidades para a exploração de novos territórios narrativos. As narrativas seriadas de longa duração incentivam novos modos de engajamento das audiências e fazem da cultura participativa um dos componentes centrais do mundo da história. O compartilhamento de narrativas serializadas reconfigura o ecossistema audiovisual, cria novas formas de envolvimento que renovam as práticas de produção e consumo do produto audiovisual. Neste processo, a mobilidade da mídia central ganha destaque e estimula a geração de conteúdo pelos usuários, intensificando o trânsito de conteúdos entre filmes, séries e webséries, jogos digitais e dispositivos móveis, entre outras mídias. Os manuais de roteiro para formatos convencionais definem a narrativa seriada como uma estrutura episódica, protagonizada por uma personagem ou centralizada em torno de um tema, que progride ao longo do tempo, segundo a lógica de acumulação de capítulos. Neste sentido, a estrutura do episódio " tem começo, meio e fim, como o unitário, mas está inserido num conjunto maior, que lhe dá sentido total " (PALLOTTINI, 1998, p. 45), apresentado núcleos dramáticos independentes e simultâneos que se entrelaçam no desenrolar da narrativa. A estrutura episódica

In "Less is More, More or Less: Teaching Flash Fiction," I outline a series of observations I've gleaned about the form from my recent experience teaching an 8-week summer course online in Writing Flash Fiction. This was a topics course, one which relied on self-design, as there are very few textbooks or models devoted to the subject. My purpose would be to share my syllabus and discuss the experimental strategies I took for approaching the form, aiming to help other teachers who might have an interest in this subject, while also sharing lessons learned from working with students who primarily experienced this as their initial introduction to creative writing. These lessons will not only illuminate how today's generation of students apprehend the role of literature in the "snack culture" they are living in, but also offer numerous ways of exploiting this unique form for effective teaching of fiction writing and issues in literature.

MORE MATERIALS from the presentation on this topic are available on scribd: 
https://www.scribd.com/collections/5982310/Teaching-Flash-Fiction-Writing

or https://www.scribd.com/Dr_Arnzen

Despite previous references to the themes of disability and bodily nonnormativity in Sadeq Hedayat’s fiction, it has yet to be extensively re-read from this viewpoint. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, and particularly by employing thoughts and concepts from the developing areas of critical masculinity studies and disability studies, I read two understudied short stories by Hedayat: “Abji Khanom” and “Davood the Hunchback.” Both stories foreground the crucial intersection of gender and bodily nonnormativity as manifested in the social embodiments of the stories’ titular characters. While also intending the essay to serve as a very brief introduction to the above critical areas, I seek to answer the following questions about the stories: What has excluded the main characters from meaningful social interactions in their societies? What is the significance of Hedayat’s foregrounding the junction of gender and bodily nonnormativity in both stories? What might have caused each character’s highly pessimistic view toward his or her embodiment? I argue that the nonnormative bodies of both characters—whose societies legitimize a certain hierarchy of bodies—have afflicted them with stigmatized and hence socially devalued embodiments that render as liable both characters’ gender performances. This has brought about the characters’ social exclusion. Also, despite their difference in sex, both characters appear to be victims of similar hegemonic masculine ideals in their patriarchal ableist societies, which have internalized in our characters a pessimistic personal-tragedy view toward disability and bodily nonnormativity.

This book review of Emma Young's important monograph calls for more inclusivity in short story theory.
Article also accessible here: https://academic.oup.com/cww/article/14/1/144/5316465

Contemporary Women's Writing, Volume 14, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 144–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpy028

Carver in the Age of Trump a valuable opportunity to consider the perspective of that demographic in detail. Carver's work reminds readers that these are often " decent men " who have been dealt bad hands " in a plentiful world " and therefore " behave badly " (Weber 37): Doreen Ober's willingness to play along with Earl's diet scheme in " They're Not Your Husband, " for example, suggests her understanding that Earl is a victim of uncontrollable circumstances. But if Carver's work can foster sympathy across the political divide in the Age of Trump, it also offers a critique of these men's behavior. Carver repeatedly shows how the same social and economic anxieties that energize Trump supporters prompt toxic assertions of masculine privilege in the men of Carver country, rather than productive coping strategies. Examining the ways in which " What Is It? " " A Serious Talk, " and other stories illustrate this dynamic, this presentation will suggest that the same ideal of self-reliant manhood that Trump aims to project provokes in Carver's men symbolic displays of power and authority that are as harmful as they are ineffectual.

The article is an attempt at comparing two short stories published fifty years apart: Vladimir Nabokov’s “The Visit to the Museum” (1939) and Steven Millhauser’s “The Barnum Museum” (1990). An atypical venture into gothicity to dramatize an imaginary return to Soviet Russia is juxtaposed with a more characteristic engagement with the fantastic in praise of the imagination and popular culture. Blurring the boundary between exhibition space and ‘the real world’ through the figure of an infinite museum, the two texts variously mobilize the gothic tradition, with its crucial tensions between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the illusory, the internal and the external, the past and the present, the dream and the nightmare. Entering into complex relationships with historicity, the two short stories position themselves very differently with regard to the notions of the individual and the communal.

Originally published in 1901, East of Suez was Alice Perrin’s first collection of short stories.  Her fascinating and thought-provoking tales of Anglo-Indian life rival the best work of Kipling, and were hugely successful in their day.  Perrin tells stories of illicit love and betrayal set against a beautifully-drawn backdrop of the mystical east, interweaving the supernatural with exquisite details of her characters’ lives.

In his article on Don DeLillo’s novel 'Ratner’s Star' G. S. Allen describes terrorism as a language that is constantly dismissed by society’s interior discourse as incomprehensible and “insane“. It rejects any concerted idiom and does not belong to the sphere of possible enunciations. Although terrorism – like any other communication – is a manipulation of symbols, it therefore has to be mediated in order to become audible/visible. In the first instance this allows to retrace the close interdependence of terrorism and media representations, the impact of reports and images trying to “translate” the violent statement, as well as the terrorist tactics of staging their acts for media consumption. In addition Allen’s thesis implicitly calls on the arts and literature as inter- and possibly transdiscoursive tools “that produce a vent in the canopy of conventions and beliefs in order to admit a little free and windy chaos.” Thus, artistic practice might realize the bridging between the otherwise indiscernible fact of terrorism and public perception and at the same time is essentially qualified to reflect on its own strategies of visualization.
While certainly all of DeLillo’s fiction is characterized by such critical reflection, his early short story 'The Uniforms' foregrounds the respective mediation process in an outstanding way. The text does not directly refer to terrorism but to an intermediary representational system; it is a loose “transcription” of Jean-Luc Godard’s movie 'Weekend' (1969) whose protagonists happen to be kidnapped by a band of antibourgeois and ultra violent Hippie-terrorists. The film’s random atrocities, its main motifs, distanced narrative attitude and fragmented montage style are unvariably adopted by DeLillo. However, the story does not simply repeat the movie but inserts a referential stance by emphasizing its derivational and meta-character. Moreover, it accentuates the rhetorical as well as ideological implications of mediating terrorism by turning Godard’s “theoretical rifle” (R. Stam) against the director himself: 'The Uniforms' hyperbolizes the formal traits of 'Weekend' in such a way that Godard’s movie is shown to transform terrorism – or any political action – into pure aestheticism and thereby ironically becomes a terrorist act itself.
Similarly, Don DeLillo’s latest short story 'Baader-Meinhof' deals with terrorism as a phenomenon filtered by visual media and then re-mediated by literature. In order to display the inexpressible content of terrorist and state violence and at the same time install an allegory for the failure of interpersonal communication, it refers to the 'October 18, 1977' series of paintings by Gerhard Richter which in turn is based on newspaper and police photographs of the RAF-terrorists killed at Stammheim. But in contrast to the earlier text that exposes the aspect of aesthetic trivialization in any artistic rendition of violence as well as in terrorism itself, Baader- Meinhof seems to advance another view: here, painting and literature appear as paradoxical amplifying systems which – precisely because they abstract from the “real” – are predestined to reach out for its unrepresentable chora.