Feast and folly : cuisine, intoxication, and the poetics of the sublime / Allen S. Weiss.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Weiss, Allen S., 1953-

Series:

SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture

SUNY series in postmodern culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Cooking, French.

Food habits--France.

Food habits.

Gastronomy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (170 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, c2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Treats French cuisine as a "fine art," offering both historical background as well as a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste. What would it mean to speak of cuisine as a "fine art"? Combining an analysis of French cuisine with cutting-edge postmodernist critique, Feast and Folly provides a fascinating history of French gastronomy and cuisine over the past two centuries, as well as considerable detail regarding the preparation of some of the colossal meals described in the book. It offers a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste, exploring the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetics and rhetorical forms of the modern culinary imagination. Allen S. Weiss analyzes the structural preconditions of considering cuisine as a fine art, connects the diverse discursive conditions that give meaning to the notion of cuisine as artwork, and investigates the most extreme psychological and metaphysical condition of the aesthetic domain--the sublime--in relation to gastronomy. Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including The Aesthetics of Excess and Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon , both published by SUNY Press, and (with Lawrence R. Schehr) French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture .

Contents:

""Feast and Folly""; ""Contents""; ""Acknowledgments""; ""Preface: Transcendent or Transcendental?�Cuisine as Fine Art""; ""1. Drunken Space""; ""2. The Ideology of the Pot-au-feu""; ""3. In the Devil�s Kitchen""; ""4. The Epic of the Cephalopod""; ""5. Tractatus Logico-Gastronomicus""; ""Postface: An Introduction to Modern French Cuisine through SeveralExemplary Menus""; ""Notes""; ""Select Bibliography""; ""About the Author""; ""Index""; ""A""; ""B""; ""C""; ""D""; ""E""; ""F""; ""G""; ""H""; ""J""; ""K""; ""L""; ""M""; ""N""; ""O""; ""P""; ""R""; ""S""; ""T""; ""V""; ""W""

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-152) and index.

ISBN:

0-7914-8788-1