Recipe for a world: Foodways, language, and the aesthetics of everyday life

This project reimagines Michel de Certeau's work in the Practice of Everyday Life (vols. I and II) within the context of modern American culture, particularly his contention that food practices, or foodways, represent one way of "making a world" (de Certeau, Practice ix). The purpose of this project is to analyze the relationship between language (oral and written) and foodways and the role this relationship plays in determining the being and the identities of human subjects and the worlds they inhabit.;The first chapter sets up the theoretical framework and historical scope for the entire project. This chapter analyzes how being and identity are formed through oral and written accounts about eating and cooking. Moving from the general to the specific, I present examples of food discourses in modern Western culture, beginning in the seventeenth century, and in American culture, beginning in the nineteenth century, to illustrate how telling about food can operate as both a vehicle by which dominant ideas are reinforced and as a tool for resistance to an oppressive culture.;Chapters two through five focus on possibilities for subjective reinvention and re-creation of identities specific to modern American culture through telling about eating and cooking. Works from twentieth-century American literature, ranging from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons to Don DeLillo's White Noise, are used as examples of discourses on food that challenge ideal representations of an array of American subject positions.