ABSTRACT

(In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach is a collection of essays spanning diverse geographic areas such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Despite this geographic variance, they all question disordered eating practices represented in literary and filmic works. The collection ultimately redefines disorder, removing the pathology and stigma assigned to acts of non-normative eating. In so doing, the essays deem taboo practices of food consumption, rejection and avoidance as expressions of resistance and defiance in the face of restrictive sociocultural, political, and economic normativities. As a result, disorder no longer equates to "out of order", implying a sense of brokenness, but is instead envisioned as an act against the dominant of order of operations. The collection therefore shifts critical focus from the eater as the embodiment of disorder to the problematic norms that defines behaviors as such.

section Section One|53 pages

Theoretical and Formal Contours

chapter 1|15 pages

Suckling Pig or Potatoes?

Class Politics and Food Symbolism in Eastern European Film during Communism

chapter 2|19 pages

Haptic for Gourmets

Cinema, Gastronomy, and Strategic Exoticism in Eat Drink Man Woman and Tortilla Soup

section Section Two|66 pages

Disordered Eating beyond the West

chapter 4|17 pages

White Pigs and Black Pigs, Wild Boar and Monkey Meat

Cannibalism and War Victimhood in Japanese Cinema

chapter 7|14 pages

The Dangerous Vegan

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the Anti-Feminist Rhetoric of Disordered Eating

section Section Three|82 pages

Disordered Eating in the West

chapter 9|17 pages

Eating the Dead

Transgressive Hungers and the Grotesque Body in Ulysses

chapter 10|17 pages

Hungry for Honey

Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki

chapter 11|15 pages

“Identica a loro?”

(In)digesting Food and Identity in Igiaba Scego’s “Salsicce”

chapter 12|16 pages

From Bartholomew Fair to Bridesmaids

Ben Jonson’s Fecopoetics and Gendered American Pop Culture