UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles American Food Culture
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Stacie Cassarino 2014 © Copyright by Stacie Cassarino 2014 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION American Food Culture, the Language of Taste, and the Edible Image in Twentieth-Century Literature by Stacie Cassarino Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2014 Professor Michael North, Chair In a study ranging from Futurist cookbooks to fast-food lyrics, this dissertation opens up new perspectives on modernist writing in relation to key developments in American food culture. It resituates popular culinary texts within a discourse of literary aesthetics and rereads literary texts as they reflect the conditions of alimentary production and consumption. Pairing chefs and poets — Julia Child & Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon & Frank O’Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor & Harryette Mullen — I show how a modernist fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of a nation undergoing tremendous shifts: from an austere wartime sensibility of patriotic eating, to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism, and finally, to racially inflected supermarket pastorals in the second half of the century. My research engages an i interdisciplinary cross-section of literary and visual forms, drawing on culinary history, art theory, cultural anthropology, race and gender studies, eco-criticism, and food studies, while remaining invested in literary analysis, to illuminate the correlating aesthetic economies of foodstuff and language, and to rethink the collision of popular culture and high art.
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