From the Scenes of Queens: Genre, AIDS and Queer Love (original) (raw)
Related papers
Editorial Medicine and the Cinema: Making Sense of Death
2008
Towards the end of the seventies, Kermode published an extremely interesting and much debated essay-The Sense of an Ending-on the raison d'être of narrative fiction. According to this renowned critic, to make the radical contingency of life bearable we can only resort to fiction. Men, like poets rush into the middest, "in medias res", when they are born. They also die in "mediis rebus", and to find meaning in the space of our lives require fictitious agreements with the origins and purposes that can give meaning to life and poems 1. We are merely an interval, a parenthesis, in the course of time. We believe we live in a state of permanent "crisis"; we believe we perceive that our own time here o earth contributes a "critical" epoch of transition, the end of something and the beginning of something new. Hence our need-to use the terminology of Kermode-for apocalypses able to organise our chaotic reality by establishing an origin (Genesis) c...
My work here addresses two quite complex issues. The first one is the virulence of the hostility toward gay men that the AIDS pandemic has released: this is the backdrop against which Jarman's extended elaboration and mourning for his own death is performed, after his diagnosis as body-positive in 1986. The second issue links to the open question of public mourning and its relation to AIDS in the early 90s, when the AIDS epidemic is not at its height, but it is certainly more visible than before, and many artists register the impact of the new sensibility this medical and social emergency actually moulds.
The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature, 2020
Abstract & Contents Page: The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift, and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights. Encompassing a diverse range of mediums and genres – including biography and autobiography, documentary, drama, elegy, film, the novel and graphic novel, opera, picturebooks, poetry, television, and more – the contributors offer a dynamic mix of approaches that range from expansive perspectives on particular periods and genres to extended analyses of select case studies. Essays are included from every major Western period, including Classical, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and so on, right up to the contemporary. This collection provides a telling demonstration of the myriad ways that humanity has learned to live with the inevitability of death, where “live with” itself might mean any number of things: from consoling, to memorializing, to rationalizing, to fending off, to evading, and, perhaps most compellingly of all, to escaping. Engagingly written and drawing on examples from around the world, this volume is indispensable to both students and scholars working in the fields of medical humanities, thanatography (death studies), life writing, Victorian studies, modernist studies, narrative, contemporary fiction, popular culture, and more. Table of Contents Introduction PART I Traversing the Ontological Divide – Introduction The Final Frontier: Science Fictions of Death – Brian McHale "Still I Danced": Performing Death in Ford’s The Broken Heart – Donovan Sherman Death and the Margins of Theatre in Luigi Pirandello – Daniel K. Jernigan Forbidden Mental Fruit? Dead Narrators and Characters from Medieval to Postmodernist Narratives – Jan Alber Literature and the Afterlife – Alice Bennett The Novel as Heartbeat: The Dead Narrator in Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones – Neil Murphy Dead Man/and Woman Talking: Narratives from Beyond the Grave – Philippe Carrard The View from Upstream: Authority and Projection in Fontenelle’s Nouveaux dialogues des morts – Jessica Goodman PART II Genres – Introduction Big Questions: Re-Visioning and Re-Scripting Death Narratives in Children’s Literature – Lesley D. Clement In the U-Bend with Moaning Myrtle: Thinking about Death in YA Literature – Karen Coats Death and Mourning in Graphic Narrative – José Alaniz Death and Documentaries: Heuristics for the Real in an Age of Simulation – Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter Death and the Fanciulla – Reed Way Dasenbrock Death, Literary Form, and Affective Comprehension: Primary Emotions and the Neurological Basis of Genre – Ronald Schleifer PART III Site, Space, and Spatiality – Introduction Ecocide and the Anthropocene: Death and the Environment – Flore Coulouma A Disney Death: Coco, Black Panther, and the Limits of the Afterlife – Stacy Thompson Suicide in the Early Modern Elegiac Tradition – Kelly McGuire Institutions and Elegies: Viewing the Dead in W. B. Yeats and John Wieners – Barry Sheils and Julie Walsh Death "after Long Silence": Auditing Agamben’s Metaphysics of Negativity in Yeats’s Lyric – Samuel Caleb Wee The Spatialization of Death in the Novels of Virginia Woolf – Ian Tan "Memento Mori": memory, Death, and Posterity in Singapore’s Poetry – Jen Crawford PART IV Rituals, Memorials, and Epitaphs – Introduction Death and the Dead in Verse Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece – Arianna Gullo Fictional Will – Helen Swift Monumentalism, Death, and Genre in Shakespeare – John Tangney Death and Gothic Romanticism: Dilating in/upon the Graveyard, Meditating among the Tombs – Carol Margaret Davison Death, Literature, and the Victorian Era – Jolene Zigarovich The Aura of the Phonographic Relic: Hearing the Voices of the Dead – Angela Frattarola Anecdotal Death: Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets – Laura Davies Biography: Life after Death – Ira Nadel PART V Living with Death: Writing, Mourning, and Consolation – Introduction "An immense expenditure of energy come to nothing": Philosophy, Literature, and Death in Peter Weiss’s Abschied von den Eltern – Christopher Hamilton Paradox, Death, and the Divine – Jamie Lin Inner Seeing and Death Anxiety in Aidan Higgins’s Blind Man’s Bluff and Other Life Writing – Lara O’Muirithe Autothanatography and Contemporary Poetry – Ivan Callus When Time Stops: Death and Autobiography in Contemporary Personal Narratives – Rosalía Baena "Grief made her insubstantial to herself": Illness, Aging, and Death in A. S. Byatt’s Little Black Book of Stories – Graham Matthews PART VI Historical Engagements – Introduction On the Corpse of a Loved One in the Era of Brain Death: Bioethics and Fictions – Catherine Belling Death to the Music of Time: Reticence in Anthony Powell’s Mediated Narratives of Death – Catherine Hoffmann Death and Chinese War Television Dramas: (Re)configuring Ethical Judgments in The Disguiser – W. Michelle Wang Where Do the Disappeared Go? Writing the Genocide in East Timor – Kit Ying Lye "Doubtfull Drede": Dying at the End of the Middle Ages – Walter Wadiak Urbanization, Ambiguity, and Social Death in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn – Wanlin Li 42. Coda – Julian Gough
2017
Spectatorship is a dialogue with cultural expectations, anxieties and morals. In many activist performances the viewers struggle to come to terms with what is presented onstage either aesthetically, or morally. Accordingly, the art of AIDS is a great paradigm of social struggle which produced works of “high” art (in the sense of technically complex pieces of work). Moreover, early AIDS art publicly exposed the socially intolerable and the morally unacceptable, precisely because the works of art were “infected” with a cultural capital of unbearable otherness and, for some, “abnormality.” The aim of this paper is to examine a common aesthetic technique in the art of AIDS, which is to present the acting subject in limbo between appearance and disappearance, presence and absence as a metaphor for an upcoming death/aphanisis that must be previewed and witnessed. The pieces that are going to be discussed are: the last self-portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989); the last self-portrai...
Path(o)s of Mourning. Memory, Death and the Invisible Body in Derek Jarman's Blues
The essay addresses two quite complex issues. The first one is the virulence of the hostility toward gay men that the AIDS pandemic has released: this is the backdrop against which Jarman's extended elaboration and mourning for his own death is performed, after his diagnosis as body-positive in 1986. The second issue links to the open question of public mourning and its relation to AIDS in the early 90s, when the AIDS epidemic is not at its height, but it is certainly more visible than before, and many artists register the impact of the new sensibility this medical and social emergency actually moulds. Considering a specific time span (the 90s) and focusing mostly on cinema a strategic, privileged arena where gay cultures resist to social and cultural sanctions, this work elaborates on how AIDS as a deathly social and cultural destiny has suggested strategies of mournings that introduce new artistic practices. The analysis is specifically focused on Derek Jarman's last works, culminating in the film Blue (1993).
'Own Deaths' − Figures of the Sensable in Péter Nádas's Book ans Péter Fogács's Film
Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 2014
The paper examines the fi gures of ‘sensable’ intermediality in Péter Nádas’s book, Own Death (2006), an autobiographical account of the author’s heart failure and clinical death and in the screen adaptation of the book by Péter Forgács with the same title (Own Death, 2007). The book and the film problematize the cultural, discursive, and medial (un)representability of a liminal corporeal experience (illness, death) in which the very conditions of self-perception, bodily sensation, and conceptual thinking appear as “other.” In the film corporeal liminality and its medial translatability are not only thematized (e.g. through the untranslated German word umkippen ‘tip over,’ ‘fall over’), but shape the embodied experience of viewing through the use of photo-filmic imagery, still frames, fragmented close-ups, slow motion, or medially textured images. These do not only foreground the foreign, undomesticable experience of the body and “own death” as other, but also expose the medium, the membrane of the film, and confer the moving image a “haptic visuality” (Marks). The haptic imagery directs the viewer’s attention to the sensuality of the medium, to the filmic “body,” enabling a “sensable” (Oosterling) spectatorship, an embodied refl ection on the image, on the “sensual mode” (Pethő) of becoming intermedial.