Less dependent than the novel on the containing medium of the book (codex), the short story has an inherent power to move between different media – the magazine, the spoken word, the anthology, the story cycle, etc. This chapter examines how this transmedial power has impacted the form and content of the short story from the early nineteenth century to the present day. In particular, we examine the impact on the short story of the magazine; the creative writing program; the technology of photography; the spoken voice; and the audio tape. We see how transmediation informs themes such as literary commercialization and craft, and techniques such as realism and metafiction. The authors discussed include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, Nam Le, Jennifer Egan, Eudora Welty, Charles Chesnutt, Ted Chiang, John Barth, Elizabeth Tallent, and Jenn Alandy Trahan.

Traditionally underexplored by historians of modern Iran, over the past few years slavery in Iran has become a recognizable subject of historiographic inquiry. Taking as an example the transmediation of a Persian legend (Dāsh Ākul) into literary fiction, and then film, this chapter explores the limits and contradictions of slavery’s historical recovery. In the cinematic version of Dāsh Ākul, the narrative foe Kākā Rustam wears blackface, reactivating a historical detail lost in Sadeq Hedayat’s famous short story of the same name published forty years prior. In Masūd Kīmīā’ī’s 1971 film, Kākā Rustam’s blackface recalls the fact that he was the child of African slaves, witness to his parents’ brutal murder at the hands of their master. This chapter argues that the various transformations and distortions that occur through the medial transmission of Dāsh Ākul illustrate how distortion is constitutive of, rather than merely contingent to slavery’s archive.

This chapter continues to uncover Steinbeck’s interest in Mexico (and the Mexican Revolution) and his relevance as a thinker on the Global South and its social inequalities. Turning to Steinbeck’s collaborative projects in Mexico, the documentary film about water sanitation, The Forgotten Village, and The Pearl--both novel and film made with the Mexican director Emilio Fernandez--we encounter experimental artistic forms that embody a transamerican political vision. If The Forgotten Village fails in its efforts to politicize and improve the living conditions of the indigenous peoples it depicts, then The Pearl represents a more successful attempt to participate in history. Comparing the novel and the film reveals a creative dialogue between Steinbeck and Fernandez, in which the novel’s techniques of sound and vision look forward to its existence as a film. Together with a new understanding of uncertainty and of a human consciousness extending into and capable of changing the world, The Pearl has a curious temporality that imagines society on the verge of revolutionary change.