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A political 'brief': performativity and politicians in short works of Austrian satire.

The primary texts addressed here are very short works of satire: including short dramas (or ‘dramolets’) by Antonio Fian, and a graphic novel cum comic book by Leo Lukas and Gerhard Haderer, genres of writing that are, arguably, not designed for actual, physical performance. Dramolets are often conceived as resistant to, or at least ironically challenging of the very notion of staged performance. Paradoxically, although graphic novels are intended for reading, the visualised enactment through images together with the framing of dialogue, demand the reader’s engagement to complete a kind of performance of the printed material.

The discussion here uses insights from performativity theory to explore the interface between the real-life ‘performances’ of politicians (e.g. Jörg Haider, Wolfgang Schüssel) and the embodiment or figuration of these agents in creative writing. Taking up the notion that works of literature can be seen as ‘quasi speech acts’, the argument is made both for the transformational power of the act of reading and for the status of these works as having a resonance beyond the necessarily short ‘duration-time’ of a physical performance. Austria has a rich tradition of language-experimentation, and this article brings examples to demonstrate how recent short works deploy their linguistic strategies primarily to expose the alleged xenophobia of contemporary Austrian politics.