2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Nov 16, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ENG 230 - Reading Voraciously: Food and Literature in the 20th Century

To claim that “cooking can produce something that approaches an aesthetic emotion,” was daring in 1954, when Alice Toklas situated herself among the modernists with the bold claim that cooking was a form of art. Yet she was also situating herself within a long literary and philosophical tradition of thinking aesthetic taste alongside gustatory taste. Taking up the idea of food as an aesthetic phenomenon, this course traces a transnational history of literary thinking about food within the long twentieth century, with special attention to the relationship between food and such identity categories as gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity.

For English majors, this course may satisfy the D-3 or E requirements but cannot double count. For English minors, this course can count either as a seminar in Theory or as a 200-level English seminar, but it cannot double count for the two requirements.

Prerequisites: Prerequisites: One 100-level English literature course (ENG 100-199) or permission of instructor

Course Designation/Attribute: DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually