Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

From Plato’s dismissal of food as a distraction from thought to Kant’s relegation of the palate to the bottom of the hierarchy of the senses, the sense of taste has consistently been devalued by Western aesthetics. Kant is often invoked as evidence that philosophers consider taste as an inferior sense because it belongs to the realm of the private and subjective and does not seem to be required in the development of higher types of knowledge. From a gastrosophical perspective, however, what Kant perceives as a limitation becomes a new field of enquiry that investigates the dialectics of diet and discourse, self and matter, inside and outside.  The essays in this book examine the importance of food as a pivotal element – both materially and conceptually – in the history of the Western avant-garde. From Gertrude Stein to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Samuel Beckett, from F.T. Marinetti to Andy Warhol, from Marcel Duchamp to Eleanor Antin, the examples chosen explore the conjunction of art and foodstuff in ways that interrogate contemporary notions of the body, language, and subjectivity.

Delville, Michel

Arts & Photography

Routledge

The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

"Excellent . . . the only critical book on prose poetry that not only provides a historical background for the prose poem in English, but also focuses on contemporary American prose poets."--Peter Johnson, Providence College The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s. Delville reassesses the work of established prose poets in relation to the history of modern poetry and introduces writings by some whose work in the form has so far escaped mainstream critical attention (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, Russell Edson). He describes the genre's European origins and the work of several early representatives of a modern tradition of the prose lyric (Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce). By applying a broad range of theory to the history of the prose poem, Delville adds evidence to its reputation as a norm-breaking form by writing within, against, and across existing genres and traditions. He shows that the history of the contemporary prose poem is, in many respects, the record of its efforts to question both the nature of the "poetic" or "lyric" mode and the aesthetic and ideological foundations of a variety of other genres and subgenres.
Michel Delville teaches at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a senior research assistant at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels. He is author of a study of J. G. Ballard and of articles on contemporary English and American literature.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

University Press of Florida

"Excellent . . . the only critical book on prose poetry that not only provides a historical background for the prose poem in English, but also focuses on contemporary American prose poets."--Peter Johnson, Providence College The American prose poem has a rich history marked by important contributions from major writers. Michel Delville's book is the first full-length work to provide a critical and historical survey of the American prose poem from the early years of the 20th century to the 1990s. Delville reassesses the work of established prose poets in relation to the history of modern poetry and introduces writings by some whose work in the form has so far escaped mainstream critical attention (Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Patchen, Russell Edson). He describes the genre's European origins and the work of several early representatives of a modern tradition of the prose lyric (Charles Baudelaire, Max Jacob, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce). By applying a broad range of theory to the history of the prose poem, Delville adds evidence to its reputation as a norm-breaking form by writing within, against, and across existing genres and traditions. He shows that the history of the contemporary prose poem is, in many respects, the record of its efforts to question both the nature of the "poetic" or "lyric" mode and the aesthetic and ideological foundations of a variety of other genres and subgenres.
Michel Delville teaches at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a senior research assistant at the National Fund for Scientific Research in Brussels. He is author of a study of J. G. Ballard and of articles on contemporary English and American literature.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

This study examines how hunger narratives and performances contribute to a reconsideration of neglected or prohibited domains of thinking which only a full confrontation with the body’s heterogeneity and plasticity can reveal. From literary motif or psychosomatic symptom to revolutionary gesture or existential malady, the double crux of hunger and disgust is a powerful force which can define the experience of embodiment. Kafka’s fable of the "Hunger Artist" offers a matrix for the fast, while its surprising last-page revelation introduces disgust as a correlative of abstinence, conscious or otherwise. Grounded in Kristeva’s theory of abjection, the figure of the fraught body lurking at the heart of the negative grotesque gathers precision throughout this study, where it is employed in a widening series of contexts: suicide through overeating, starvation as self-performance or political resistance, the teratological versus the totalitarian, the anorexic harboring of death. In the process, writers and artists as diverse as Herman Melville, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Christina Rossetti, George Orwell, Knut Hamsun, J.M. Coetzee, Cindy Sherman, Pieter Breughel, Marina Abramovic, David Nebreda, Paul McCarthy, and others are brought into the discussion. By looking at the different acts of visceral, affective, and ideological resistance performed by the starving body, this book intensifies the relationship between hunger and disgust studies while offering insight into the modalities of the "dark grotesque" which inform the aesthetics and politics of hunger. It will be of value to anyone interested in the culture, politics, and subjectivity of embodiment, and scholars working within the fields of disgust studies, food studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and media studies.

Norris, Andrew

Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart And the Secret History of Maximalism

A comparative account of the musical and cultural acts of Zappa and his cohort, collaborator and antagonist Captain Beefheart. Written in the iconoclastic spirit of Zappa's art, this book traces the mixed media experiments of California freakdom through the dada blues of Beefheart, mapping out the pleasures of imaginative excess.

Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture S)

Norris, Mr Andrew

Biographies & Memoirs

Salt Publishing

A comparative account of the musical and cultural acts of Zappa and his cohort, collaborator and antagonist Captain Beefheart. Written in the iconoclastic spirit of Zappa's art, this book traces the mixed media experiments of California freakdom through the dada blues of Beefheart, mapping out the pleasures of imaginative excess.

Music

Salt Pub

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Delville, Michel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Delville, Michel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Delville, Michel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre

The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust: Perspectives on the Dark Grotesque (Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature)

Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Secret History of Maximalism (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture S)

Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart And the Secret History of Maximalism