The AIDS Crisis and the Incarnations of Fear in Tony Kushner’s "Angels in America"

Anna Bendrat

Abstract


The discussion of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America is set at the intersection of crisis and fear inherent to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. The paper delves into two distinct manifestations of fear induced by this crisis – the fear of commitment in the face of AIDS, exemplified by Louis Ironson, and the fear of self-identification as a gay individual, embodied by Joe Pitt. By integrating insights from the psychology of fear, the article strives to single out social and cultural connotations of the AIDS crisis as depicted in the play. It marks out Kushner’s perceptive construal of fear as a destructive force in the context of the deteriorating human relationships.


Keywords


Angels in America; AIDS crisis; fear; Tony Kushner; Martha C. Nussbaum; The Monarchy of Fear

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bendrat, A. (2020). Transitioning the Edges of Multiple Text Worlds: A Cognitive Processing Path from Textuality to Texture in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Polish Journal for American Studies, 14, 243–268. https://doi.org/10.7311/PJAS.14/2/2020.08

Brogaard, B., & Gatzia, D. E. (Eds.). (2020). The Philosophy and Psychology of Ambivalence:Being of Two Minds. Routledge.

Burke, K. (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press.

Butler, I., & Kois, D. (2018). The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America.Bloomsbury USA.

Cifor, M. (2022). Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS. University of Minnesota Press.

Finkelstein, A. (2017). After Silence: A History of AIDS through Its Images. University of California Press.

Frank, A. J., & Wilson, E. A. (2020). A Silvan Tomkins Handbook: Foundations for Affect Theory. University of Minnesota Press.

Gillespie, B. (2018). Martha Nussbaum explores how fear helped fuel a political crisis. Univeristy of Chicago News. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/martha-nussbaum-exploreshow-fear-helped-fuel-political-crisis

Jarymowicz, M., & Bar-Tal, D. (2006). The dominance of fear over hope in the life of individuals and collectives. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36(3), 367–392. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.302

Jockers, M. L. (2021). Syuzhet: Extracts Sentiment and Sentiment-Derived Plot Arcs from Text (R Package Version 1.0.6) from CRAN [R]. https://github.com/mjockers/syuzhet (Original work published 2015)

Kinsella, J. (1992). Covering the Plague: AIDS and the American Media. Rutgers University Press.

Konijn, E. (2000). Acting Emotions: Shaping Emotions on Stage. Amsterdam University Press.

Kushner, T. (2006). Angels in America, a Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Millennium Approaches/Perestroika. Theatre Communications Group Inc., U.S.

Latcham, B. (2020, March 30). Plague on Stage: How theatre helps us in times of crisis. Palatinate.

https://www.palatinate.org.uk/plague-on-stage-how-theatre-helps-us-in-times-of-crisis/

Nall, R. (2021, September 27). A History of HIV and AIDS in the United States, from 1981 to 2021. https://www.healthline.com/health/hiv-aids/history

Nemani, A. (2016, January 1). Angels in America: The American Tragedy. Medium. https://abhinemani.medium.com/angels-in-america-the-american-tragedy-ff115c4d0560

Nussbaum, M. C. (2018). The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis.Simon & Schuster.

Pastore, J. L. (1993). Confronting AIDS through literature: The responsibilities of representation. University of Illinois Press.

Peuser, A. (2017). AIDS and the Artist’s Call to Action. Lucerna, 11, 10–22.

Staupe-Delgado, R., & Rubin, O. (2022). Living through and with the global HIV/AIDS pandemic:Distinct “pandemic practices” and temporalities. Social Science & Medicine, 296, 114809. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.114809

Stricot, M. (2021). The story of AIDS, from fear to fight. CNRS News. https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-story-of-aids-from-fear-to-fight

Tomkins, S. S. (2008). Affect Imagery Consciousness. The Complete Edition. Springer.

Tuncer, F. F. (2020). The spread of fear in the globalizing world: The case of COVID–19. Journal ofP ublic Affairs, 20 (4), e2162. https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.2162




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2024.48.2.13-33
Date of publication: 2024-07-10 11:05:24
Date of submission: 2024-04-07 16:29:18


Statistics


Total abstract view - 477
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 207

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2024 Anna Bendrat

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.