Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime (Postmodern Culture) - Softcover

Weiss, Allen S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0791455181 ISBN 13: 9780791455180

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

From the Back Cover

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 , on the one hand, 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791455181
• ISBN 13: 9780791455180
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 170