Course Description:
AIDS is a disease that has caused suffering and loss beyond compare. AIDS also and indeed on top of its uncountable casualties is a disease that, arguably like no other, has lend itself to cultural stigmatisation through the media, which have, from the very start, ascribed and attributed meaning – very much in the sense of blame – not only to the disease itself, but also, and not least, to its victims. This seminar seeks to trace the different cultural constructions of AIDS, from its emergence in the early 1980s, when it was still notoriously called the 'gay plague', until the late 1990s.
We will start by looking at two very different audio-visual texts, And the Band Played on and Zero Patience: both centre around the man infamously identified as Patient 'Zero'; however, the first text is a TV documentary rife with all the alleged truth claims of this genre, while the second is a musical comedy that offers a decidedly more camp approach to the topic.
We will continue to explore the patient/doctor-divide, discussing two short stories by Adam Mars-Jones and a selection of poems by Rafael Campo.
Loss and the specificity of gay grief will be the central topics in Alan Hollinghurst's elegiac novel The Folding Star, a Booker-Prize short-listed text that problematises the need for gay mourning in a society that would not even recognise the loss of same-sex attachment as bereavement.
Towards the end of the seminar we will turn to Tony Kushner's unparalleled epic Angels in America (and its congenial adaptation by Mike Nichols) to position the disease in the wider scope of the fin-de-millennium zeitgeist.

Please read/watch:
And the Band Played On. Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Perf. Matthew Modine, Alan Alda, Phil Collins, Richard Gere, Angelica Huston, Ian McKellen, and Lily Tomlin. HBO, 1993.
Angels in America. Dir. Mike Nichols. Perf. Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Mary-Louise Parker, Jeffrey Wright, Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson, and James Cromwell. HBO, 2003.
Campo, Rafael. "Her Final Show." What the Body Told. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. 25. Print.
-. "Imagining Drag." What the Body Told. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. 34. Print.
-. "Superman is Dead." What the Body Told. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. 95. Print.
Hollinghurst, Alan. The Folding Star. London: Vintage, 1998.
Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. New York: TCG, 2013.
Mars-Jones, Adam. "Slim." Monopolies of Loss. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. 9-18.
---. "Remission." Monopolies of Loss. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. 165-88.
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. London: Penguin, 2009. [esp. AIDS and Its Metaphors]
Zero Patience. Dir. John Greyson. Perf. Normand Fauteux, John Robinson, Michael Callen, Marla Lukofsky, Dianne Heatherington, Charlotte Boisjoli, and Brenda Kamino. Zero Patience Productions, 1993.