Eating bodies eating texts: Metaphors of incorporation and consumption in Walter Benjamin, Dada, and futurism

This study examines modernism and the avant-garde. The analysis builds on close readings of Walter Benjamin's texts on eating, the review Dada (published in Zurich between 1917 and 1922) and Marinetti and Fillia's Futurist Cookbook (1930). In the first part of the dissertation, I argue that consumption is the dominant cultural paradigm of the 1920s. I show how the nutritional texts of the time propagate the ideology of consumption, by linking it to efficiency, and show how Benjamin, Dada and the Second Wave Futurists each counter "efficiency" through alternative models of consumption. In the second part of the dissertation, I analyze Benjamin's construction of epistemology as a form of oral incorporation that yet resists an "assimilatory" model of consumption. In the final section I argue that the Dada poets and artists conceive indigestion and constipation as physiological moments of resistance against the flow of commodities and the accumulation of capital. Finally, I suggest that the Futurist Cookbook constructs the "eating body" as simultaneously a work of art and a political subject, a body in which the relation between the Futurists' ideology and that of the Fascists is repeatedly negotiated. Throughout the study, I offer an examination of the roots of a modernist European culture that faces an increasingly hegemonic ideology: consumerism. The dissertation points to the politically specific features of each movement or group of texts, while maintaining that modernism's aesthetics and epistemological grounds extend beyond national borders as a consequence of their renegotiation with consumerism.