Due to some e-mail failures (entirely my fault, sigh), I’m now teaching a new class in the spring, assuming enough students sign up for it, fingers crossed. I thought some of you might enjoy the course description. Hope I get to teach it — I think this could be great fun. 🙂
Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions for food writing in an earlier thread!
ENGL 105 Understanding Fiction: Food Writing
Food can be a consolation, a memory, an aspiration. When we write and read about food, we access some of the deepest aspects of the human condition — love, grief, even rage. In this course, we’ll delight our palates with a range of delicious food writing, starting with masters of fiction (such as Anton Chekov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Shirley Jackson, Amy Tan) and beloved food writers (MFK Fisher, Nora Ephron). We’ll luxuriate in the rich intensity of Babette’s Feast. We’ll sink into Bryan Washington’s stories of growing up in a restaurant kitchen, Laura Esquivel’s magical realist novel, Like Water for Chocolate, Adam D. Roberts’s hilarious behind-the-food-industry scenes in Food Person, and Han Kang’s nightmarish The Vegetarian. We’ll stir in a little nonfiction too (which uses many of the same literary techniques as fiction), such as Crying in H-Mart, Kitchen Confidential). We’ll finish up with Annalee Newitz’s delightful robots-in-the-kitchen novella, Automatic Noodle. Some of the writing will be hilarious, some may be horrific — but all of it will give us an opportunity to utilize close reading, cultural analysis, and critical thinking, to help you study and understand various aspects of fictional craft (structure, point of view, setting, character, etc.).
Picture of my breakfast: uppuma and mackerel curry.
