Testimonial literature and experiences of alterity: AIDS narratives and diaries in France.

My dissertation analyzes AIDS testimonies in their enunciative context as sites of social negotiation and subjective positioning. Despite the personal and historical uniqueness of their AIDS experiences, authors like Alain Emmanuel Dreuilhe, Herve Guibert, Gilles Barbedette, Pascal de Duve, Christophe Bourdin, and Vincent Borel face similar forms of existential and social schisms since they can no longer recognize themselves in the cultural archetypes and narratives that previously shaped their identities. In this context of estrangement and exile, I explore how these authors negotiate the need and the right to tell their own stories and how, by engaging in a critical dialogue with various dominant discourses that confine and silence the threatening differences they embody, these testimonies redefine the personal and positional modes of authority in the enunciative context of AIDS. I argue that testimonial literature thus gives voice to different forms of alterity suppressed within French speaking societies and proposes alternative forms of narcissism and social belonging. In doing so, this literature questions historical, political, and medical representations that maintain homogeneous visions of social identity and personal memory. AIDS's testimonial literature is not, then, a stable site where tensions and antagonisms disappear, but constitutes a room for maneuver that permits positional moves and allows persons living with AIDS to negotiate the terms and the recognition of their experience. My study also demonstrates that it is crucial to read AIDS testimonies not only as narratives that display the ideological exclusions that reinforce personal trauma through various social narratives, but, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have shown in another context, as mediations also that call for responsiveness on the part of their readers. I analyze how these authors fulfill a duty of memory toward those who did not survive the epidemic, and how, in Jacques Derrida's terms, their testimonies solicit a similar response of hospitality from their readers. In my conclusion I propose a general poetics of the bearing of witness to traumatic experiences of alterity, proposing that testimonial writing stages performative spaces of dialogue where the traumatic memory and experience that haunts the author is passed on to the reader.Ph.D.Language, Literature and LinguisticsRhetoricRomance literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132112/2/9959738.pd