(In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)

(In)digestion in Literature and Film: A Transcultural Approach is a collection of essays spanning diverse geographic areas such as Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Taiwan and the United States. Despite this geographic variance, they all question disordered eating practices represented in literary and filmic works. The collection ultimately redefines disorder, removing the pathology and stigma assigned to acts of non-normative eating. In so doing, the essays deem taboo practices of food consumption, rejection and avoidance as expressions of __resistance__ and defiance in the face of restrictive sociocultural, political, and economic normativities. As a result, disorder no longer equates to "out of order", implying a sense of brokenness, but is instead envisioned as an act __against__ the dominant of order of operations. The collection therefore shifts critical focus from the eater as the embodiment of disorder to the problematic norms that defines behaviors as such. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Editors List of Contributors Acknowledgments On (In)digestibility and the Politics of Identity: An Introduction Section One: Theoretical and Formal Contours 1 Suckling Pig or Potatoes?: Class Politics and Food Symbolism in Eastern European Film during Communism 2 Haptic for Gourmets: Cinema, Gastronomy, and Strategic Exoticism in Eat Drink Man Woman and Tortilla Soup 3 Pro Ana and Mia Blogs, and Care of the Self Section Two: Disordered Eating beyond the West 4 White Pigs and Black Pigs, Wild Boar and Monkey Meat: Cannibalism and War Victimhood in Japanese Cinema 5 “Such a thin slice of watermelon!” Eating and Hunger in Macabéa’s Malnourished World 6 Multiplicities of Identities and Meanings behind Devouring Characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away 7 The Dangerous Vegan: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and the Anti-Feminist Rhetoric of Disordered Eating Section Three: Disordered Eating in the West 8 Dietary Perversions and Subversion of Nature in Huysmans’s Against Nature 9 Eating the Dead: Transgressive Hungers and the Grotesque Body in Ulysses 10 Hungry for Honey: Desire in Dacia Maraini’s Il treno per Helsinki 11 “Identica a loro?”: (In)digesting Food and Identity in Igiaba Scego’s “Salsicce” 12 From Bartholomew Fair to Bridesmaids: Ben Jonson’s Fecopoetics and Gendered American Pop Culture Index This is a collection of essays representative of diverse geographies, all of which underscore moments of disordered eating. The volume removes the pathology and stigma surrounding non-normative eating, highlighting these acts as expressions of resistance against the sociopolitical order of operations.