“Art What thou Eat”: Food
in Literature, Art, and Culture
Session Coordinator:
David Schoonover,
Emily Yu
University of
“Food for Thought:
Power and Foodways in Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God”
Many of Zora Neale Hurston’s recent critics have either focused on the folkways or the rhetorical strategies found within Their Eyes Were Watching God when reading the text. Critics regard Janie’s ability, or inability, to discover herself as a result within these projects. However, few critics have addressed the importance of food and foodways as a means of reading the text’s power relationships and social hierarchies. The practices of foodways illustrate the forms of cohesion for a group’s identity, while demonstrating the relationships of power within the group.
Zora Neale Hurston’s experiences as an anthropologist in
efp@northwestern.edu
“Eating Satirically: Food in the 1996 Film Adaptations of
Jane Austen's Emma”
In Austen’s Emma food is a commodity that circulates up and
down the social ladder, marking the generosity of the privileged as they
dispense gifts of hospitality. Crucial meals serve to highlight the social
connections, hierarchies, and tensions between individuals, providing a vehicle
for satiric interplay. The visual display of food in the film adaptations
points to the crucial differences between the two movies. The American version,
with Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma, represents a sunny romantic comedy, while the
British version, with Kate Beckinsale as Emma, a darker, more historically
accurate, class-inflected comedy of errors, revealing the poverty of the
working classes and the role of numerous servants. These are practically absent
from the Hollywood version, in which elegant food appears effortlessly
onscreen, relegated to one more decorative item in the stunning backgrounds
that provide a backdrop for the movie stars, evoke nostalgia for a sanitized
past, and cater to the popularity of fairytale Regency romances. Both screen
adaptations invite us to participate in upper-class pleasures of conspicuous
leisure and consumption, but the English version also grapples with the serious
issues present in the Austen novel.
Geoffrey Stacks
"The Ghostliness of Bread: The Hidden Drama of Baking in Pynchon's Mason & Dixon”
In Pynchon's novel Mason
& Dixon, Mason's father, a baker, is
This short passage is not the only treatment of food within
this large book, which inclu
Elizabeth Robins Pennell
(1855-1936), author, art critic, and friend and co-biographer of James McNeill
Whistler, belonged to the elite circle of 1890s aesthetes who promoted the
credo of “Art for Art’s Sake.” As
evidenced by the food essays Pennell anonymously penned for the
Laura Fasick
“The Good Breast”: Women as Food-Givers in Victorian and 21st-Century Culture
Just as anorexia has become a major topic in recent studies of Victorian literature, so anorexia has become a major concern in current debates over the physical and emotional health of North American young women. Studies of Victorian literature frequently claim that the Victorians idealized female anorexia as a sign of purity. Today, while scientists search for a genetic basis for anorexia and while psychiatrists debate over how to treat it, many observers blame today’s media for idealizing an unrealistically thin female body type. Yet both in Victorian times and in our own, an enormous amount of the praise or blame assigned to female relations with food derives not from the extent to which females deprive themselves but from the extent to which they nourish others. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic theory of the “good breast” vs. the “bad breast” (that is, of the nourishing vs. the non-nourishing woman, with imagery derived from the breast-feeding infant’s first encounter with either food or a female food-giver), I will use examples both from Victorian literature and from today’s popular culture to show that the food-friendly female, not the food-denying female, is idealized in both periods.
Leah Kind
Northern Illinois Univ.
“Eat Me! Food as a Consuming Force in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf”
The life experiences of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield traversed many of the same pathways, and the two authors included many of the same subjects within their writing. Although these two women were not close or intimate friends, they were quite familiar with the writings of each other, and a unique “working” relationship was thus established. One thread between their stories is the inclusion of food, which always represents far more than simple nourishment. This paper seeks to examine the use of food by Mansfield and Woolf, demonstrating their sharp and all consuming critiques of the society around them. In the stories of both authors, the emergence of food is linked to an internal wrong, signifying that the problems of society extended far into the domestic sphere, and are hardly confined within that “quick bite.”
Michelle E. Moore
The
“Unlimited Quantities of M-M-M Food”: The Modern Artist as Cannibal in the Postwar American Novel
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley series and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita recall and revise the figure of the cannibal in American fiction. Ripley kills his friend, Dickey Greenleaf, whom he has been living off of in a rather parasitic way. Metaphorically, he consumes his friend just as a mythical cannibal consumes another so that a particular trait may be digested and incorporated into the cannibal’s identity. Humbert Humbert consumes the image Lolita just as rapidly as she consumes comic books. Both characters act as ideal readers and interpreters who cannibalize the world as they read. In turn, they must cannibalize in order to produce art as well. Each character represents the Modernist ideal as they blend subject with object; artist with art.
Cara Ogburn
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“Allez Cuisine: Constructions and Deconstructions of Gender on the Food Network”
In a recent interview on salon.com promoting his forthcoming
book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, writer
Michael Pollan noted that Americans seem obsessed with food and by cooking as ritual,
Though feminists have viewed kitchens as sites of women’s
oppression and labor exploitation, the Food Network’s construction of gender in
the kitchen seems to simultaneously complicate and reify this. This complicated
relationship, it seems, points to larger crises in gender and identity
construction in
lfmargolies@manchester.edu
“Eat Me: Rage and Rebellion in Rosario Castellanos’ ‘Cooking
Lesson’ ”
Food and its preparation have a long and significant history in the works of
Mexican women writers. In her famous letter to Sor Filotea, Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz