{"id":2728,"date":"2025-01-27T14:54:44","date_gmt":"2025-01-27T19:54:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/?p=2728"},"modified":"2025-04-18T13:54:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-18T17:54:16","slug":"food-lit-worth-chewing-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/research-highlights\/food-lit-worth-chewing-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Food lit worth chewing on"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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When English Professor Elizabeth Blake opened The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, <\/em>she was captivated by more than the recipes. Published in 1954, after the death of Toklas\u2019 partner, Gertrude Stein, the cookbook is a hybrid document. The book\u2019s pages are rife with gossip and stories about artists in modernist Paris, but it is also a serious literary and theoretical investigation into the power of food, the value of art, and queer life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"Professor<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\u201cOur understanding of how sexuality operates is culturally specific and prescribed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blake<\/a> spent a decade researching the intersection of queer theory,
modernist studies, and food studies after finding inspiration in Toklas\u2019 recipes and stories. Her book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism\u2019s Queer Forms<\/em>, is the
first scholarly monograph to combine the three fields.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think about the way structures of nutrition and structures of heteronormativity mimic each other\u2014we\u2019re taught that we\u2019re supposed to eat certain things at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, all of which are culturally specific,\u201d Blake says. \u201cSimilarly,\u201d she adds, \u201cour understanding of how sexuality operates is culturally specific and prescribed. I\u2019m interested in the way modernist writers think about transgression in terms of eating, which invites us to think about transgression in terms of sexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Edible Arrangements<\/em>, Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each chapter presents a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes\u2014such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield\u2014in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself. While Toklas\u2019 cookbook isn\u2019t discussed within Edible Arrangements, <\/em>Blake\u2019s book turns a scholarly gaze on its preoccupations in order to reveal new ways of thinking about queer life, literature, and the pleasure of eating.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Department of english<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When English Professor Elizabeth Blake opened The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, she was captivated by more than the recipes. 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