| This study analyzes the ways in which food, eating, and consumption function in texts ranging from a nineteenth-century novel to television cooking shows. Informed mainly by feminist, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies, the dissertation argues not for a single way that foodways, operate in textual productions, but instead examines the various ways they work in individual texts. However, the overarching argument of the study is that food, eating, and consumption contribute to the formation of individual, communal, and national identities. It thereby moves from issues of the body to issues of the body politic, from the individual's negotiations and contestations with issues of identity, to the nation's modes of attempting to fix its identity as a nation. A biological necessity, food and eating are here examined as body-building, not in the physiological, but in the cultural sense of the term. People use food as a means by and with which to delineate themselves and their cultural and national forms.;In order to support the general points asserted above, I analyze Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, several texts by Sylvia Plath, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Paradise, Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, Paul Mazursky's film Scenes from a Mall, Don DeLillo's White Noise , and television cooking shows on the Food TV Network. With this melange of texts, I demonstrate how pervasive and significant food and eating images are in the cultural productions of the United States and how they reverberate with psychological and sociological meaning. |
