"This book revisits representations of AIDS in the 1980s in the U.S. in order to highlight a discourse of trauma and witness that emerged in the wake of a crisis. The book also emphasizes the potential of literary language to call attention to historical trauma where other discourses may fail"--.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Empathic Medicine
• 2 The Poetics of AIDS
• 3 Metaphor, Militancy, and AIDS in Susan Sontag and Paul Monette
• 4 Memorializing AIDS through Metaphor
• 5 Tony Kushner’s Progressive Ethics
• 6 Accounting for
• 7 American High
• 8 Unspeakable Things
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author