ENGL428N Food Words: Stories, Being, and the Gut

"The cliché “you are what you eat” lights up the complex network uniting food, eating, and being, as well as the role of words or stories in navigating that network. How are we conditioned socially and culturally to understand some things as edible—suitable for being incorporated into our selves—and others not, and what social hierarchies (of class, race, or nation) does such conditioning seem to authorize? What about our traditions of gathering and consuming to mark our familial, communal, or religious identities? Or our attitudes about the best diet for a healthy gut or sustainable living? What about agricultural or economic policies for growing and providing food to local, national, or global communities? Modern and contemporary literature prominently represents food, eating, and digestion in order to rework stories about the self and belonging, and about social exclusions and exploitation.

In this course, we will put ourselves into this literary conversation to consider how we talk about food production, preparation, and consumption across a range of food-word genres, from cookbooks to diets to farm policy. It’s a conversation that will push us not only to consider the impact of our consumption, for instance, on the environment, but also to rethink more radically what “being” even means for organisms that incorporate and are incorporated by other organisms in a food chain. Texts may include excerpts from F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook and The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Ntozake Shange’s If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries, Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt, and Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats, as well as poetry by Gertrude Stein, Lorine Niedecker, Oswald de Andrade, Thom Gunn, Li-Young Lee, and Brenda Hillman."

Section(s):
0101 -  Christina Walther