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Aids And American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics Of An Epidemic, Thomas Long
Aids And American Apocalypticism: The Cultural Semiotics Of An Epidemic, Thomas Long
Thomas Lawrence Long
Since public discourse about AIDS began in 1981, it has characterized AIDS as an apocalyptic plague: a punishment for sin and a sign of the end of the world. Christian fundamentalists had already configured the gay male population most visibly affected by AIDS as apocalyptic signifiers or signs of the "end times." Their discourse grew out of a centuries-old American apocalypticism that included images of crisis, destruction, and ultimate renewal. In this book, Thomas L. Long examines the ways in which gay and AIDS activists, artists, writers, scientists, and journalists appropriated this apocalyptic rhetoric in order to mobilize attention to …
Do You Believe In Magic? Literary Thinking After The New Left, Sean Mccann, Michael Szalay
Do You Believe In Magic? Literary Thinking After The New Left, Sean Mccann, Michael Szalay
Sean McCann
Toward the end of the 1960s, the New Left and the counterculture developed a libertarian theory of politics that emphasized symbolic action and self-realization. A concomitant suspicion of formal political institutions and a turn to cultural politics have since become common to intellectual discourse within the humanities. This essay argues against these attitudes, while tracing them from the protest movements of the late sixties to contemporary fiction and literary theory. The authors conclude by detailing the strong affinities between this vision of radicalism and the interests of professional labor within the present-day university.