BEYOND MEMORIALIZATION: RHETORIC, AESTHETICS, and AIDS LITERATURE by MICHAEL CHIAPPINI Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the R
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BEYOND MEMORIALIZATION: RHETORIC, AESTHETICS, AND AIDS LITERATURE by MICHAEL CHIAPPINI Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY May 2019 2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the dissertation of Michael Chiappini Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy* Committee Chair T. Kenny Fountain Committee Member Michael Clune Committee Member Kimberly Emmons Committee Member Rachel Sternberg Date of Defense March 8, 2019 *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 3 Table of Contents List of Figures......................................................................................................................4 Acknowledgements..............................................................................................................5 Abstract................................................................................................................................6 Introduction..........................................................................................................................7 Moving Beyond the Documentary Impulse of Memorialization Chapter 1............................................................................................................................50 "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out": The Strange Epideixis of William S. Burroughs Chapter 2............................................................................................................................81 AIDS-Enhanced Vision in David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives Chapter 3..........................................................................................................................109 "GET RID OF MEANING": Author as Virus in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless Chapter 4.........................................................................................................................137 "An apocalypse of shit and piss": Rhetorical Figuration and Pornography in Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man Conclusion.......................................................................................................................172 The Future of Viral Logics Works Cited.....................................................................................................................183 4 List of Figures Fig 1. Let the Record Show................................................................................................19 Fig. 2 "Element Chart".......................................................................................................70 Fig. 3 Hieroglyphic Writing...............................................................................................70 Fig. 4 LOVE.......................................................................................................................75 Fig. 5 Imagevirus...............................................................................................................75 Fig. 6 "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in LA)........................................................................177 5 Acknowledgements This dissertation is inextricable from the work of my committee members. Thanks to my chair, T. Kenny Fountain, whose "needlessly classical" orientation to rhetoric leaves an indelible mark on my work; to Kimberly Emmons, whose influential work on genre and uptake showed me early in my graduate career that rhetors have the agency to draw from the discourses around them for fashioning arguments; to Michael Clune, whose insistence that literature is itself a form of knowing and doing that stands apart from the social informs my entire approach to both rhetorical and literary studies; and to Rachel Sternberg, whose patience in teaching me ancient Greek opened worlds of possibility for understanding how antiquity can bubble up into the present in novel ways. Special thanks to my colleagues Philip Derbesy and Ryan Mitchell for listening to me hash and rehash ideas from this dissertation over the last three years, and for their valuable insights into the problems it wrestles with, and for their generosity in commenting on drafts at all stages of the writing process. 6 Beyond Memorialization: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and AIDS Literature Abstract By MICHAEL CHIAPPINI Bridging rhetorical and literary studies, Beyond Memorialization: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and AIDS Literature, examines how AIDS Crisis writers transform medical discourses and biological images into aesthetic objects for suasory purposes. Specifically, I examine a strain of texts that rhetorically operationalize the discourses and images of HIV/AIDS, often in perverse ways, through ekphrastic techniques of rhetorical presencing. These writers and artists use vivid descriptions, striking details, evocative figures, and arresting images to bring before the eyes the unseen realities and possibilities of HIV/AIDS. In the process, these ekphrastic images, which blur the distinction between description and narrative, destabilize and erode conventional conceptions of history and memory. 7 Introduction Moving Beyond the Documentary Impulse of Memorialization What is AIDS literature? In attempting to answer this question, perhaps you thought of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, or Larry Kramer's polemical play The Normal Heart, or maybe even the work of poets Thom Gunn or Mark Doty. You probably thought of works about AIDS, after all the moniker "AIDS literature" often describes texts that represent and/or respond to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. If you are twenty-three or younger (and therefore born after the introduction of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy, or HAART, in 1996, the combination of medicines that slowed the exponential death rate and made AIDS a chronic, often manageable disease), perhaps nothing came to mind because AIDS has never been a dominant fixture of your cultural landscape; in this case, you would probably still come to the same conclusion through deduction: AIDS literature is written about or in response to AIDS. I phrase this opening question in the present tense purposely, a reversal of the structurally similar question of Kenneth Warren's provocative book What Was African American Literature? Warren's argument that the genre of African American literature both "was a historical phenomenon" and that "the possibility for its demise was built into its very reason for being" (739)i (i.e. that it was written in response to the conditions of Jim Crow and that once these conditions purportedly dissipated with the Civil Rights Act, the genre had achieved its ends) is controversial. The same structure is taken as simple fact to describe the conditions of the genre of AIDS literature: it names texts representing 8 the AIDS Crisis that often had an activist orientation that attempted to intervene in the cultural narratives of the disease and to bring about the end of the Crisis. Once that Crisis was ended, so too was the production of AIDS literature. Writing in a 2016 Huffington Post article entitled "Is AIDS Literature Dead?", the novelist John Whittier Treat asks, "Does anyone read fiction about AIDS anymore?" In an attempt to account for why it seems that no one does, Treat goes on to inadvertently define the contours of what "fiction about AIDS" might contain by suggesting that "The best stories, novels and memoirs about AIDS published in the decade of 1985-95 were written by men who were soon to die of it, insuring [sic] their silence." That is to say, he reinforces the commonsense view that AIDS fiction was produced for roughly a decade and that it was produced only by gay men with AIDS, who then died. Or, if they didn't die, Treat allows, they started writing about something else: "Other great writers of those days are alive but have turned, out of frustration with the publishing industry’s resistance to AIDS or with the need, post-trauma, to write of other things." Of course, all of this boundary defining and hypothesizing is really a ruse belying the clickbait nature of the article's title; the article is in actuality an announcement of Treat's own forthcoming historical AIDS novel, a corrective to the narrative he has just invented. Similarly, writing in a 2017 Guardian article entitled "Why are there so few novels about AIDS these days?" Zoë Apostolides replicates Treat's logic, pointing to the numbers of those who died and the inability of those who survived to overcome their trauma as reasons for the paucity of AIDS texts in the present. However, she adds a strange hypothetical dimension to the argument: "Why are there so few? We’ll never know how many books on the subject were lost when authors were claimed by the virus; 9 how many died with the intention to write about their experience and never managed to." In addition to posing a question that cannot have an answer of what these authors might have written had they lived, this kind of theorizing gives the genre of AIDS literature a hypothetical, imaginary quality—our theorizing about it tends to involve what the genre might have been, or what it ought to be, not what it actually is. As such, Apostolides adds a moral imperative to her discussion, arguing that "given the sheer numbers of people whose lives were ravaged by the virus, there should be more." She calls for a new generation of writers to take up this mantle and get over their fears of