The plague of discourse: Politics, literary theory, and AIDS

Abstract

In an article titled “The Metaphor of AIDS,” published for a popular audience in the Sunday magazine of the Boston Globe , Lee Grove, an instructor of creative writing and American literature at the University of Massachusetts, reflects on the ways in which the AIDS epidemic had altered his understanding of literary texts and his relation to the teaching of literature. Referring specifically to the Renaissance pun that brought together, at least linguistically, the experiences of orgasm and death, Grove writes: “To die,” “to have sex” – that coupling has always been figurative, metaphorical, sophisticated wordplay, a literary conceit, one of those outrageous paradoxes dear to the heart of a racy divine like John Donne. Outrageous no longer. The coupling isn't figurative anymore. It's literal. I want to consider the highly charged relation between the literal and the figural as it informs the discussion of AIDS in America and to explore the political uses to which the ideological framing of that relationship has been put. Toward that end my subtitle locates “literary theory” between the categories of “politics” and “AIDS” to indicate my belief that both of those categories produce, and are produced as, historical discourses susceptible to analysis by the critical methodologies associated with literary theory.