Reading & Composition

According to at least one influential definition of aesthetic experience, art begins when appetite ends. By this account, artistic and gustatory, or figurative and literal, taste cannot coincide; hunger and even “healthy appetite” must be satisfied before any aesthetic pursuit can take place. In this course, we’ll study works of literature and art that refuse this definition by taking denial, rather than satisfaction, as their point of departure.  Far from setting hunger aside, the texts we’ll consider try to set it to work.  Sampling from the fasting practices of medieval women mystics and contemporary couture models’ starvation diets, we’ll cultivate our critical reading, writing, and basic research skills as we consider the relationship between writing and withholding as staged in a range of contexts and cultures.  (For our purposes, “writing” will be broadly defined, to include art-making and self-invention.)  In addition to looking at mystics and models, we’ll listen to Italian Renaissance lyricists “starved” for love and to severely undernourished English Romantics.  We’ll then travel forward to the 1970s to spend time with anorectic All-American teen idols and dessert-obsessed Brazilian typists.  We’ll take virtual day trips to nearby Pelican Bay and distant Belfast, with a week’s stay in Wonderland.  Along the way, we’ll ask how hunger comes to serve as both a figure for desire (so that lyric speakers are said to hunger for affection, and scholars to hunger for knowledge) and a name for need (so that famine marks the most abject poverty).  We’ll also ask questions like the following: What do artists and writers have to teach us about “unhealthy” appetites?  What role does temperance, the moderation or curbing of appetite, play in aesthetic experience?  What happens when works of literature and art call attention to their own slightness, or lack of substance?  When, where, and in what ways has hunger become a tool of protest as well as an aesthetic category? How can we bring the work of “hunger artists” and hunger strikers to bear in our understanding of contemporary food politics, or in politics more generally?

Rather than answering these questions in abstract—and unsatisfying—ways, students will learn to read closely and to make clear and compelling arguments about literary texts.  Readings, screenings, and writing activities for the course will all encourage students to attend carefully to a wide range of aesthetic experiences, in order to develop tastes but also to work up healthy appetites for research.

In addition to reading some of the texts and watching some of the films listed below, we’ll read historical and critical works by Brown, Bynum, Deleuze and Guattari, Ellman, Klein, and Vernon, and we’ll study performance art pieces by Abramović and Mendieta, among others.

Literature:

Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Catherine of Siena, selected letters

Dickinson, selected poems

Goethe, Elective Affinities

Kafka, “A Hunger Artist” and “The Hunger Strike”

Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Mahasweta, selected stories

Milton, Paradise Regain’d

Petrarch, selected poems

Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

Shelley, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude

Vallejo, selected poems

Film:

Buñuel, The Land without Bread (1933)

Haynes, Superstar (1987)

McQueen, Hunger (2008)

Pasolini, La ricotta (1962)