Rupture and repair: Literature, genre and the AIDS epidemic

This dissertation explores how authors modified literary genres to fit the unique parameters of the AIDS epidemic during the first fifteen years of literary responses (1982-1997). Entrenched in the affected community either through infection or relationship and driven by a number of atypical literary imperatives, these authors witness, testify, and educate while engaging and navigate loss and the particulars of a death from AIDS---a death that is inherently politicized and public. The introduction addresses the charged political atmosphere of the epidemic and elucidates how literature figures in this atmosphere.;Chapter two relates the historical relationship of humor and the oppressed to establish a context through which to investigate gay men's and lesbians' connection to humor and the particular sensibility that emerged with this sense of humor. This sensibility and humor result in an appropriation of the traditional tenets of comedy and to a subsequent revision of these tenets. The chapter includes a summary-analysis of the polemics shadowing comedy in the age of AIDS and a close analysis of how the revision of traditional comedy functions in Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey, an abstinence satire within a comedy of manners, and of Doug Holsclaw's The Baddest of Boys, a farce-comedy relying on black humor.;The third chapter examines how the reworking of the prescribed parameters of the popular romance novel helped extend the audience for AIDS literature, analyzes the particular adoptions and revisions of Pearl Cleage in her best-selling novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day..., and considers Robert Ferro's novel Second Son, an important text in the AIDS canon that scholars of literature and/or the epidemic often misread while experts on the popular romance ignore because they fail to investigate the gay romance market.;The fourth chapter investigates how Thom Gunn (The Man With Night Sweats) revises and re-envisions the traditional strictures of elegy and explains how Paul Monette explodes the elegy in Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. Both Gunn and Monette publish what Joseph Cady calls immersive literature---literature intended to confront the affected community, assail readers not yet immediately affected by the epidemic, and assault reader's who deny the epidemic's impact. The fifth chapter studies the inventive activist rhetoric of David Wojnarowicz and David B. Feinberg and deliberates on the results of activism.