To Protect or to Negate?Community in An Enemy of the People and The Normal Heart

機構典藏 > College of Foreign Languages and Literature > Graduate Institute & Department of English > Proceeding > Item 987654321/106556

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://tkuir.lib.tku.edu.tw/dspace/handle/987654321/106556

Title:	To Protect or to Negate?Community in An Enemy of the People and The Normal Heart
Authors:	黃仕宜
Keywords:	An Enemy of the People;The Normal Heart;syphilis;AIDS;community
Date:	2015-10-02
Issue Date:	2016-04-27 11:16:52 (UTC+8)
Abstract:	Comparing Henrik Ibsen’s (1828-1906) An Enemy of the People (1882) and Larry Kramer’s (b.1935) The Normal Heart (1985), the paper draws on Roberto Esposito’s ideas of communitas and immunitas to explore notions of “community” in modern (late nineteenth century) and postmodern (late twentieth century) senses in light of medical and social responses to two diseases depicted in these respective works: Syphilis and AIDS. The striking resemblance between the plot lines and the specific diseases each story speaks to foregrounds the dialogism not only of the correlation between self (communal/biological collectives) and the other (pollution, disease), but that of disparate epistemological spheres. What validates degrading Enemy as an example of badly didactic bigotry is Ibsen’s erroneous medical knowledge (on syphilis) and, on top of all, the idea that the illness-enemy association is only a metaphor. In other words, it is not modern to fuse medicine and morality; human behaviors would not in any way change its biological entity. Such an epistemological stance yet becomes questionable one hundred years later: the AIDS epidemic brings to the fore the degree to which an outbreak may present moral issues. In light of this, the paper discusses the role morality play in human’s endless pursuit of (medical) knowledge (truth).
Relation:	2015「生命倫理與醫學人文」研討會︰身體、心理與疾病書寫」
Appears in Collections:	[Graduate Institute & Department of English] Proceeding

Files in This Item:

File	Description	Size	Format
index.html		0Kb	HTML	249	View/Open

Loading...