Describing his own early response to reading about Wang Lung's hunger in Pearl S. The narrator rejects the internalized impulse to repress his pleasure, thinking to himself, "to hell with being ashamed of what you liked" (266).Īs this example demonstrates, writings about food and eating may serve to draw the reader into racialized subjectivity, but they may also complicate desires and appetites. Eating it openly, on the street, is an act of defiance and liberation for the narrator" (156). Discussing a scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in which the narrator purchases a hot baked yam from a street vendor, Kessler notes its racialized significance: "the yam is as packed with meaning as it is with pulp. For Kessler, food in great fiction "opens doors to double and triple meaning" (156). He questions how these early meals function, whether they "stimulate the reader's appetite for the larger meal ahead" (151). Proposing a "Gastronomic Theory of Literature," Brad Kessler ponders a friend's observation that "every good novel she'd ever read opened with a food scene in the very first or second chapter" (149). Janice Mirikitani, "Why Is Preparing Fish a Political Act?" (86)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |