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.

Literature & Fiction

Michel Delville

History & Criticism

Routledge

Despite increasing recognition of his unique talents as a novelist and a short story writer, J.G. Ballard (b. 1930) remains one of the most controversial presences in contemporary British fiction. His obsessions with various forms of violence, alienation and sexual perversion have puzzled many readers, critics and publishers. Still, Ballard's imaginative powers and the originality of his work have also won him the admiration of a broad and international readership. Examining the whole range of Ballard's writings, from the early science fiction stories to Cocaine Nights (1996), Delville's study offers a critical and theoretically informed analysis of his achievements as a novelist and a commentator on contemporary culture. It also identifies and clarifies a number of themes which have occupied Ballard throughout his career. These recurrent concerns include the latent and manifest meanings of technological culture, the impact of modern media on the private and collective imagination and the postulate

J.G.Ballard (Writers and Their Work)

British & Irish

Liverpool University Press

<p>Poetry. Translated from the French by Gian Lombardo. In THIRD BODY, Michel Delville continues in the tradition of Belgian prose poetry exemplified by such prose poets as Henri Michaux, Geo Norge, and Eugene Savitzkaya. These writers honorably and admirably extend the francophone tradition of the prose poem as started in nineteenth century France by Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire. Delville utilizes the prose poem as a way to access profound poetic sentiments and provide trenchant social commentary through prosaic means--"To convert our ideas into material things." This conversion requires an understanding not simply of the material conditions Delville wishes to elucidate but also the ways in which political shifts play out on an intimate human scale, and vice versa. Throughout Third Body, Delville's lush, fervent prose poems masterfully articulate his philosophical concerns, while demonstrating a profound pleasure in using this literary form to express them. He is our interpreter, our navigator, our scribe across the terrain he sets out, and we need him here to guide us. We need literature like Delville's to help us make sense of human events because, on its own, "The eye doesn't see beyond sky."</p>

Third Body

Poetry

Quale Press

Food, Poetry, and the Aesthetics of Consumption: Eating the Avant-Garde

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Books by Michel Delville