AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

by David Caron

Overview

The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself. To understand why it took France so long to react to the AIDS crisis, AIDS in French Culture analyzes the intersections of three discourses—the literary, the medical, and the political—and traces the origin of French attitudes about AIDS back to nineteenth-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299172947
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	10/02/2001
Edition description:	1
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

David Caron is associate professor of French at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction: Where Does AIDS Come from?	3
	Metaphors of Science	4
	Two Models of Health and Disease	10
	French Novels and the Construction of Otherness	13
Chapter 1	Degeneracy and Inversion: The Male Homosexual as Internal Other	17
	The Discourse of Degenerescence	18
	Inventing the Male "Homosexual"	22
	Literature as Medicine, or Medicine as Literature?	27
Chapter 2	Gender Indecision and Cultural Anxiety: Outing Zola	31
	Theory and Practice of the Experimental Novel	32
	Naturalism as Heterosexuality	43
	Queering Napoleon III?	49
	The Rambling Degenerate and the Instability of Authorship	53
Chapter 3	Reclaiming Disease and Infection: Jean Genet and the Politics of the Border	62
	Disease, Vermin, and Abjection	65
	Crossing Metaphorical Borders, or Contaminating Language	80
	Literal Borders	85
Chapter 4	A Cultural History of AIDS Discourse: France and the United States	96
	What AIDS Criticism?	96
	AIDS Representations	98
	Constructing the AIDS Sufferer	105
Chapter 5	AIDS and the Unraveling of Modernity: The Example of Herve Guibert	112
	Herve Guibert	113
	Returning the Doctor's Gaze	119
	The Diseased Subject	132
	The Discourse of Disease and the Disease of Discourse	135
	Gossip, Rumors, and the Margins of Modernity	139
	Conclusion: French Universalism and the Question of Community	149
	Notes	165
	Bibliography	183
	Index	197

Editorial Reviews

Caron (French, U. of Michigan) analyzes the slow reaction of the French people to the AIDS epidemic as expressed in literary, medical, and political discourses. He contends that French attitudes about AIDS have their roots in 19th-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality. In particular, the study focuses on national values in Emile Zola's 1892 novel bacle/>. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"Literary and cultural analysis come together here as Caron casts brilliant light on the disastrously inadequate public response to the AIDS pandemic in France. . . . He shows how literature has supplied the communitarian voice that would otherwise have been lacking."—Ross Chambers, author of Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author

From the Publisher