Diseases and calamities: its representations and semantic displacements in White Noise (1984) and Angels in America (1992)

Río de Janeiro

Congreso; XVIII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Internacional de Literatura Comparada; 2007

UFRJaneiro- AILC

Abstract: The significant position of disease and its representations in social and literary discourse has already been stressed by Susan Sontag in her works Illness as Metaphor (1977) and Aids and its Metaphors (1988). Sontag´s analysis shows how diseases are charged with different meanings, which, in most cases, mystify their symptoms, causes and effects, and how those metaphorical constructions shape and contribute to the misconception of certain diseases. In this paper I will continue with the analysis of the linguistic representations of diseases in two literary texts, White Noise (1984) and Angels in America (1992), and will show the way those fictional representations of diseases and calamities allow for semantic displacements, deconstruct mystifying representations in popular culture and are used to point out the underlying conflicts of contemporary societies such as sexual identities and power relations.