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Short Form #1

Sam Crane and Pinny Grylls, Grand Theft Hamlet, still, 2024.

FLORIAN FUCHS, CIVIC STORYTELLING: THE RISE OF SHORT FORMS AND THE AGENCY OF LITERATURE (ZONE BOOKS, 2023)

As criticism grows longer and stranger and increasingly shapeless, or otherwise gets talkier and more marginal and moves closer to the comments section, it might be a good idea to think about how forms dictate writing. Florian Fuchs’ dense study of short literary forms – the novella, proverb, fable, fairy tale, and so on – begins with the ars topica of Aristotle and somehow lands on the video work of Hito Steyerl. In between, examples drawn from Kleist, Hölderlin, Goethe, Keller, Flaubert, Joyce, and Benjamin, among others, keep the text from dissipating into theoretical abstraction. What is perhaps central here is Fuchs’ differentiation of the novel, which simulates its own reality, from the novella, which he claims inserts itself into our pre-existing experience. A seemingly minor distinction at first, but one which gat…