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D. Caron, AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

D. Caron, AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

Publié le par Matthieu Vernet

Compte rendu publié dans Acta fabula, dossier critique "La mort de l'auteur" (juin 2019, vol. 20, n° 6) : Étienne Bergeron, L’inversion de la question du VIH & la nécessité de la « contamination »

David Caron, AIDS in French Culture: Social Ills, Literary Cures

Madison : The University of Wisconsin Press, 2001.

EAN 9780299172947.

216 p.

Prix 19,95USD

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Why France ignored the AIDS crisis ?
The deluge of metaphors triggered in 1981 in France by the first public reports of what would turn out to be the AIDS epidemic spread with far greater speed and efficiency than the virus itself. To understand why it took France so long to react to the AIDS crisis, AIDS in French Culture analyzes the intersections of three discourses—the literary, the medical, and the political—and traces the origin of French attitudes about AIDS back to nineteenth-century anxieties about nationhood, masculinity, and sexuality. "Literary and cultural analysis come together here as Caron casts brilliant light on the disastrously inadequate public response to the AIDS pandemic in France. . . . He shows how literature has supplied the communitarian voice that would otherwise have been lacking."—Ross Chambers, author of Facing It: AIDS Diaries and the Death of the Author

David Caron is associate professor of French at the University of Michigan.