Abstract
The present paper investigates the shift in fictional representation of AIDS as manifested in Michael Saag’s Positive: One Doctor’s Personal Encounters with Death, Life, and the US Healthcare System and Susan Ball’s Voices in the Band: A Doctor, Her Patients, and How the Outlook on AIDS Care Changed from Doomed to Hopeful. It explores how the two novels, through their fresh and vivid representation of the patients, redress relevant stereotypes through a semi-documentary, fictional revisiting of their winding routes. It also covers the ways both novels portray the very process of the disease contraction and treatment, and the patients’ attempts to cope with it in a balanced manner that invests the documentary as a strategy for braiding the scientific and the literary in the representational process. The overall purpose is not to normalize the disease but rather to help deconstruct the stereotypical image of it in mainstream media and revisit the negative historical, social, and religious associations of it through the selected novels. For this purpose, the "docu-literary" approach is used as an analytical and evaluative critical method to explore the representation of AIDS in the selected novels.
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