In an essay on the form called "Structure of the Fait-Divers," Roland Barthes defined it as total or immanent information (containing nothing outside of itself): "Disasters, murders, rapes, accidents, thefts, all this refers to man, to his history, his alienation, his hallucinations, his dreams, his fears".
Some days the news is depressing right across the board – natural disasters, murders, heiresses being denied entry to Japan.
The many Afghans who were this week commemorating their own national disaster, the murder a year ago of Ahmad Shah Masoud, leader of the only group to hold out against the Taliban, mostly decided that the capital was too dangerous a place to linger in for long.
This time, going live to mark 60 years of ITV, Corrie has allowed itself no big stunt disasters or murder mystery resolutions.
His poisonously funny little picture books — deadpan accounts of murder, disaster and discreet depravity, narrated in a voice that affects the world-weary tone of British novelists like Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett — established him as the master of high-camp macabre.
Norms that have evangelists saying that hurricanes and natural disasters and even murder is the price to pay for homosexuality.
A global, national and local catastrophe The murder of nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001 was a national and international disaster.
Disaster, hypocrisy, humiliation and murder lurk in and around pools.
Franklin's three-year exploration of the northern coast of Canada in search of the Northwest Passage had ended in disaster amid accusations of murder and cannibalism, with 11 of the 20 members of the group killed and the survivors reduced to eating lichen, their own boots, and the remains of rotten carcasses abandoned by wolves.
He watches us as if we were in a play or a movie and the only thing we do have control over is our emotions, and that's what makes it interesting for him because he causes all the bad things to happen in the world, all the natural disasters, war and murders, all that sort of thing, and he likes watching our reactions to it".
