cfp.english.upenn.edu

Please note that we have extended the deadline for submissions to 12/15/10.

Food! The Conference!
ESA Conference, March 18, 2011
Sponsored by the CUNY Doctoral Student Council
Co-Chairs Alec Magnet and Jennifer Little
Foodconference2011@gmail.com
http://tiny.cc/8t9hm

From Michael Pollan to the recent hullabaloo about anorexic fashionistas and whether “plus-size” women may model underwear on ABC and Fox, food—its production, its consumption, and its effects on the bodies that eat it—has developed into the subject of even more urgent and clamorous debates. Literary scholarship has worked to keep up with the rest of the culture in exploring the uses and significance of food in literature. In the last fifteen years, an exciting number of books and articles have appeared that examine this issue through many lenses—the politics, economics, and ecological impact of food production (especially in colonial and post-colonial contexts), for example, as well as the performative rituals and material culture of eating, the gendering of food and of disordered eating, psychoanalytic theories of internalization and introjection, philosophies of taste, and so on. Since 2006, at least seven journals of literary scholarship and criticism have published special issues on food. As Timothy Morton writes in his introduction to the journal Romanticism’s issue Food Studies, the research that scholars have done in this emerging interdisciplinary field “leads them to conclude that eating and taste are bound up with the formation of the (idea of the) human subject.” Given the relative newness of food as a serious and important topic in literary studies, we look forward to papers with an exciting variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches.

We welcome 15-20 minute papers on any topic related to food. EXTENDED DEADLINE: Please send 300 word abstract and bio to foodconference2011@gmail.com by 12/15/2010.

Possible conference paper topics might address
• Fasting, asceticism, starvation, eating disorders, humger art, pica
• Cannibalism
• Taste and aesthetics
• Eating/Reading/Sex
• Politics of food production/distribution (economy, ecology, ecocriticism, empire)
• Famine (manufactured and otherwise)
• Diets, fads, food movements, nutrition theories, the four humors.
• Vegetarianism/veganism
• Purity codes/cults
• Eating and foundation myths
• The Eucharist/Corpus Christi celebration
• Breastfeeding
• Psychoanalysis of incorporation and devouring
• Melanie Klein & Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Melancholy, depression, and hunger
• Satiety, fullness, pleroma
• Nostalgia, Proust, apple pie
• Social rituals of dining, table manners, the children’s table, tea ceremonies, class implications of dinner/supper/tea
• Cookbooks and recipes as literature
• Opium eating and other drugs/Lotos eaters/poison and intoxicants
• Digestive system as text/text as digestive system
• Waste, excretion, abjection, coprophilia, constipation, diarrhoea and the undigestible
• Parasites
• Vampirism
• Oral sex
• Masturbation, Kellogg, and Graham
• Vagina dentata
• Beekeeping
• The land of Cockayne, Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Golden Age
• Sci-fi and food: Replicators in Star Trek, Soylent Green, etc.
• Rumination and contemplation
• Eating paste, eating worms, eating hats, humble pie