Holding the Man: Tragedy and the Literature of Aids

Abstract

Friedrick Nietzsche seems already to be defining Modernism when, well over a hundred years ago, he noted that the 'tropical tempo' of modernity was fragmenting traditional identities (qtd Weeks, 'Against Nature 92). Now even those fragments have become in the eyes of many, fictions, and humanistic notions of an impregnable selfhood and a bedrock identity are dismissed as essentialist wishful thinking. Such a development raises problems for an essay like this, the object of which is to examine the possibility of a revival of tragedy manifested in a certain sector of contemporary writing.