1st Edition

(In)digestion in Literature and Film A Transcultural Approach

Edited By Serena J. Rivera, Niki Kiviat Copyright 2020
    236 Pages
    by Routledge

    236 Pages
    by Routledge

    (In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach is a collection of essays spanning diverse geographic areas such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Despite this geographic variance, they all question disordered eating practices represented in literary and filmic works. The collection ultimately redefines disorder, removing the pathology and stigma assigned to acts of non-normative eating. In so doing, the essays deem taboo practices of food consumption, rejection and avoidance as expressions of resistance and defiance in the face of restrictive sociocultural, political, and economic normativities. As a result, disorder no longer equates to "out of order", implying a sense of brokenness, but is instead envisioned as an act against the dominant of order of operations. The collection therefore shifts critical focus from the eater as the embodiment of disorder to the problematic norms that defines behaviors as such.

    Introduction                                                          

    Section One: Theoretical and Formal Contours

    1. Suckling Pig or Potatoes? Class Politics and Food Symbolism in        
    2. Eastern European Film 

      Elena Popan

    3. Haptic for Gourmets: Cinema, Gastronomy, and Strategic Exoticism                
    4. in Eat Drink Man Woman and Tortilla Soup 

      Aida Roldán-García

    5. Pro-Ana and Mia Blogs and Care of the Self          
    6. Jenny Platz

      Section Two: Disordered Eating Beyond the West

    7. White Pigs and Black Pigs, Wild Boar and Monkey Meat: Cannibalism and        
    8. War Victimhood in Japanese Cinema         

      Kenta McGrath

    9. "Such a Thin Slice of Watermelon!" Fat and Thin in Macabéa’s        
    10. Malnourished World 

      Benjamin Legg

    11. Multiplicities of Identities and Meanings Behind Devouring Characters in        
    12. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away     

      Katsuya Izumi

    13. The Dangerous Vegan: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the Anti-Feminist          
    14. Rhetoric of Disordered Eating 

      Laura Wright

      Section Three: Disordered Eating in the West

    15. Dietary Perversions and Subversion of Nature in Huysmans’s          
    16. Against Nature            

      Romain Peter 

    17. Eating the Dead: Transgressive Hungers and the Grotesque        
    18. Body in Ulysses                           

      Wilson Taylor

    19. Hungry for Honey: Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki                      
    20. Eilis Kierans

    21. "Identica a loro?": (In)digesting Food and Identity in Igiaba        
    22. Scego’s "Salsicce"              

      Francesca Calamita

    23. From Bartholomew Fair to Bridesmaids: Ben Jonson’s Fecopoetics                            

    and Gendered American Pop Culture 

    Emily Gruber Keck

    Biography

    Niki Kiviat is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies at Columbia University, where her research interests include food studies; Italy’s food and material culture as manifest in films of the Economic Miracle; star studies; and the legacy of neorealist film, which was the subject of her Master’s thesis, also from Columbia. Her essay, "From Pizzaiola to Phenom: Viewing Sophia Loren Through Food," will be published in the edited volume Eve’s Sinful Bite: Foodscapes in Italian Women’s Writing, Culture, and Society (forthcoming, Bloomsbury).

    Serena J. Rivera is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. Her research interests concern the intersections of food, gender, race, and sexuality throughout Luso/Hispanophone cultural production. She has published on the topics of food metaphors in Mozambican and Cape Verdean literatures as well as the teaching of Portuguese language in the US. She has also translated Alberto Pena-Rodriguez’s News on the American Dream: A History of the Portuguese Press in the United States (forthcoming, Tagus Press). She is currently working on several article manuscripts that explore the use of food in (post)colonial nationalist rhetoric in Mozambique as well as the linkages between the abject and racial identity in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century Brazilian literature. Her monograph project comparatively examines the intersections of masculinity, food, and nation in Brazilian, Cape Verdean and Mozambican literatures.