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AIDS-Trauma and Politics considers American literary representations of the social and political silence surrounding the AIDS crisis in the U.S. in the 1980s. The book offers close readings of such authors as Paul Monette, Mark Doty, Rafael Campo, Sarah Schulman, Tony Kushner, and Larry Kramer in order to argue that the AIDS crisis was born largely without a witness and, as a result, marks a significant trauma in U.S. history. Grounded by trauma studies, AIDS-Trauma and Politics argues that the arts, exemplified here by literature and film, uniquely underscore social problems otherwise overlooked by such discourses as politics, the law, and journalism. Defining the 1980s AIDS crisis as a perfect case, this book proposes to redefine trauma not simply as an event that happened too soon, but rather as an ongoing series of oversights resulting in a failure to acknowledge or witness the humanity of those who suffer.
List of contents
1. Empathic Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Love
2. The Poetics of AIDS: Theory, Angels, and (Anti) Reparation
3. Metaphor, Militancy, and AIDS in Susan Sontag and Paul Monette
4. Memorializing AIDS through Metaphor: The Journalistic Memoirs of Paul Monette and Mark Doty
5. Tony Kushner's Progressive Ethics: Angels in America on Stage and Screen
6. Accounting for: Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart and the Healing Power of the AIDS Quilt
7. American High: AIDS Fiction, Drug Use, and NYC Activism
8. Unspeakable Things: Poetic Ethics and Silence in Contemporary American Short Stories
About the author
By Aimee Pozorski
Summary
This book revisits representations of AIDS in the 1980s in the U.S. in order to highlight a discourse of trauma and witness that emerged in the wake of a crisis. The book also emphasizes the potential of literary language to call attention to historical trauma where other discourses may fail.
