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HIV/AIDS literature: the effects of representation on an ethics of care

Younger, Laura Sue
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092520560

Abstract Details

2004, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
In my project, I argue that rigid representational constructs move narrators of HIV/AIDS literature away from a position of ethical care in descriptions of illness and the ill, and towards three deliberately assumed subject positions: hero, artist, and prophet. I argue that many narrators assume these roles to achieve some very calculated effects (punitive, dichotomizing, normalizing, socially sanctioning) and that these effects are only eroded when the roles themselves are dismantled. Finally, I examine what such a process of dismantling would look like, and how it would lead to a greater ethics of narrative care. Throughout my argument, I suggest that the unique rhetorical environment of care-taking dictated by HIV/AIDS (such as the undefined nature of the disease and the specter of homophobia which has surrounded discussion of the illness) contributes to a move away from an ethical concerns, and towards a narratorial concern with the control of representations. First, and primarily through the use of Abraham Verghese’s HIV/AIDS narrative My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story (1995), I suggest that the narrator fashions himself as a hero, and explore the implications of such self-fashioning for the plot-line of a text. I then conduct a close examination of Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well With Others (1999), with an accompanying discussion of the normalizing work done by the representations within the text. In an examination of Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On (1987), I argue that the narrator attempts to deliver the message of illness from “on high” through establishing a position for himself as prophet, and through the use of a religiously-inflected language. After examining the means by which the representational strategies used within AIDS narratives cause a narrator or a text to abandon an ethics of care, I turn in the final portion of my project to an inquiry into how an ethics of care might be enacted, and what it might look like, largely within the context of Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels in America (1993-4).
Debra Moddelmog (Advisor)
282 p.
Literature, American
HIV/AIDS Literature; Representations of Illness; Ethics of Care

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Younger, L. S. (2004). HIV/AIDS literature: the effects of representation on an ethics of care [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092520560

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Younger, Laura. HIV/AIDS literature: the effects of representation on an ethics of care. 2004. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092520560.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Younger, Laura. "HIV/AIDS literature: the effects of representation on an ethics of care." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1092520560

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1092520560
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.