The current age of AIDS has seen the emergence of a body of literature whose goal it is to make AIDS, its multifarious meanings and overwhelmingly devastating effects, not only visible, but also somehow comprehensible to as many people as possible. Much of this literature is produced by gay men and women, who are among the most intimate witnesses to the AIDS crisis. This thesis explores three AIDS narratives as manifestations of the writers' responsibilities as witnesses to and of HIV and AIDS. The first chapter examines Amy Hoffman's Hospital Time as an act of mourning through which she seeks to shape the reader as a mourner. Mourning is a responsibility, I argue, that Hoffman does not allow the reader to refuse. Reading Derek Jarman's diary Modern Nature through Jacques Derrida's reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's Ecce Homo in The Ear of the Other, Chapter Two theorizes the activist potential of the "signature." Through his garden, Jarman demonstrates how he produces a signature for his dead friends, enabling them to "live" eternally. With this signature Jarman sculpts the reader's own signature, the signature through which he intends for the reader to grant him "life" after death. It is the exposition of the possibility of life through the signature that Jarman understands as his responsibility as a witness to AIDS. And finally, Chapter Three examines Dale Peck's Martin and John as a theorization of the "middle ground" between dominant culture's representations of HIV and AIDS and AIDS activist representations. As a metafictional text, the structure of the novel requests the reader to interpret and negotiate recursively these representations. It is this very request that Peck illustrates as his responsibility. Thus, the writers' foremost responsibility, I propose, is to reproduce in the reader what the writer understands as his or her own responsibilities in witnessing AIDS. The reader must become the witness. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/24353 |
| Date | 08 1900 |
| Creators | Muzak, Joanne |
| Contributors | Clark, David, English |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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