Death is served : the serialization of death and its conceptualization through food metaphors in US literature and media

The American cultural imaginary is __hungry__ for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from language's inability to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media. The American cultural imaginary is hungry for death, and thus representations of death are prominently repeated and serialized in US literature and media. Stella Castelli shows how American culture fetishizes death as part of a repetition compulsion which stems from the inability of language to satisfactorily grasp death. Taking an intermedial approach, she investigates the forms and tropes born from this preoccupation with death and conceptualizes its imagination alongside an appetite which manifests as repetitive encoding. These metaphors of food consumption provide a hermeneutic framing for analyzing representations of death across American literature and media. Contents Introduction: The Paradoxical Nature of Death in America 1. The Text Devouring the Dead: Edgar Allan Poe and David Lynch’s American Gothic 2. I am Dead, Yet I Live – The Zombie’s Gluttonous Craving for the Living 3. Producing the Corpse: Quentin Tarantino’s Revenge Narratives 4. Ingesting the Corpse: The Cannibal’s Taste for Death – American Psycho and Hannibal 5. Creator/Destroyer: The Serial Killer as an American Phenomenon Conclusion: Death. Again Acknowledgements Bibliography List of Illustrations