Witnessing AIDS

In a clear and accessible style, Witnessing AIDS illustrates how memoirs and diaries are used as self-theorizing documents that approach personal testimony as an intervention in cultural memory.

Sarah Brophy is an associate professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

'Brophy's readings of the four texts that constitute the respective foci of her chapters are illuminating, original, articulate, and frequently provocative. This is an important book written in the face of, perhaps even against, some of our most cherished commonplace assumptions about mourning, memory, and history ... Brophy has read widely and carefully in considerations of autobiography, trauma, and so-called AIDS literature, and she has been thoroughly attentive to the existing secondary literature on her selected writers in order to render the concept of melancholy more complex, more nuanced, more problematic, and more productive than the existing literature on melancholy might allow.'

Derek Duncan, Department of Italian, University of Bristol:

'Brophy's readings of the four texts that constitute the respective foci of her chapters are illuminating, original, articulate, and frequently provocative. This is an important book written in the face of, perhaps even against, some of our most cherished commonplace assumptions about mourning, memory, and history ... Brophy has read widely and carefully in considerations of autobiography, trauma, and so-called AIDS literature, and she has been thoroughly attentive to the existing secondary literature on her selected writers in order to render the concept of melancholy more complex, more nuanced, more problematic, and more productive than the existing literature on melancholy might allow.'