The AIDS crisis and the novel

: uses of realism and the sharing of reality in French and American novels about HIV/AIDS, 1990-present

Abstract

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) has affected not only the shape of politics and culture throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but also the ways we write and create literature around the subject of embodied illness. For theorists on the AIDS crisis, the problem is one of representation. Not only are we tasked with understanding the epidemic in terms of sense and meaning, but we must also keep intact the manifold ways that it can be experienced across sites and contexts.

This thesis examines the role and impact of novel writing in accounting for and consolidating the multiple, interconnected, and contradictory realities of the AIDS crisis today. By engaging in close readings and comparative analyses of contemporary AIDS novels from France and the United States, I identify how the genre can emerge as a tool for derealising univocal and stereotyped distortions of the epidemic, enhancing a sense in which one story can also become many stories, as well as how the writing of AIDS is always left unfinished.

To this end, I argue against a swell of critiques which place the novel at the heart of a literary and socio-political “turn” for representations of AIDS—a turn which started in the 1990s and led to increasingly closed-ended, anti-communal, and narrowly-defined interpretations of the epidemic throughout Western literature. Using explorations of genre realism and Deleuzian critical philosophy, I contend that the AIDS novel has always and will continue to allow for readings that are both specific and multiple, contextually sensitive and potentially expansive, as well as conveying worlds that are as cultivated in their fiction as they are responsive in their fidelity to reality.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Lorna Burns (Supervisor)