ABSTRACT

How should creative writers, including HIV-negative writers, think through HIV as a livable illness? What is the potential for writing gay fiction in an era of ‘post-crisis’? This creative writing research draws links between literary modernism’s roots in crisis and the roots of contemporary gay realist fiction in the AIDS crisis. It suggests these origins place similar demands on writers to re-conceive elements of fiction. This paper, primarily, outlines challenges of representing HIV in contemporary fiction, and then suggests that contemporary HIV’s history of crisis provides ways to address these challenges, that the challenges may be productive. Because HIV in contemporary life is doubly invisible – viral loads may be undetectable, and the ongoing crisis can be understood as marginal or tactically historicised – aspects of creative writing after antiretrovirals exist in conversation with uncertainty, including elements that are otherwise put to representative use. By looking at some examples of post-crisis writing in contemporary gay realist fiction, the paper establishes the potential for HIV-positive representations to shift fiction-writing practice, bringing aspects of the novel such as time, metaphor and textual representation towards an aesthetics of post-crisis.

摘要

包括HIV阴性作家在内的创意作家应如何通过HIV将其视为宜居疾病？在“后危机”时代写同性恋小说的潜力是什么？这项创造性的写作研究勾勒了文学现代主义在危机中的根源与当代同性恋现实主义小说在艾滋病危机中的根源之间的联系。这表明这些起源对作家提出了重新构想小说元素的类似要求。本文首先概述了在当代小说中代表HIV的挑战，然后提出当代HIV的危机历史为应对这些挑战提供了方法，这些挑战可能富有成效。由于艾滋病毒在当代生活中几乎是看不见的，因此无法检测到病毒载量，持续的危机可以理解为微不足道的或在战术上具有历史意义的–抗逆转录病毒药物存在不确定性之后便存在着创造性写作的方面，其中包括本来可以代表使用的元素。通过研究当代同性恋现实主义小说中的危机后写作的一些例子，该论文确定了艾滋病毒阳性表达方式有可能改变小说写作方式，使小说的时间，隐喻和文本表达等方面趋向于美学。危机后。