Literary meals in Canada : the Food/books of Austin Clarke, Hiromi Goto, Tessa McWatt and Fred Wah
Literary Meals in Canada examines Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ’n Breadfruit, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and The Kappa Child, Tessa McWatt’s This Body, and Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. It asks, what does food mean to these stories, what does it allow the writers in question to say—about social structures, culture, language, and subjectivity—and how do they go about making these connections or drawing these conclusions? In other words, what are their food-writing strategies? I also read these texts as part of a larger conversation about food, a conversation taking place in academic circles as well as at the supermarket, on food labels, on television, and other media outlets. I look for moments in which my literary corpus responds to and challenges food-centred discourse. Comprised of four chapters—Production, Procurement, Preparation, and Consumption—this dissertation explicates Rachel Bowlby’s term, “literary supermarket,” through Michael Pollan and Hiromi Goto; it compares Escoffier’s haute cuisine with Austin Clarke’s “hot-cuisine”; it tracks the kinship between “doing-cooking” and writing cooking, as articulated by Luce Giard, Austin Clarke, and Fred Wah; it reads Emily Post’s advice on table manners against Hiromi Goto’s cacophony of gnashing and nibbling; and it pairs Tessa McWatt with Elspeth Probyn, both of whom share a similar approach to, and interest in, bodies that eat. The texts that make up this corpus are foodbooks. Food and the activities and processes associated with it are therefore mediated by language. For this reason the dissertation attends to the particularities and the potential effects of writing food.
Literary meals in Canada Foodbooks Austin Clarke Hiromi Goto Tessa McWatt Fred Wah