Babette's Feast Research Articles

The Power of Babette's Feast: Medical Education over Dinner

The Power of Babette's Feast: Medical Education over Dinner

A History of Danish Cinema

A History of Danish Cinema

THE FEEDING PICTURED IN THE CINEMA: CONTRIBUTION OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS / A ALIMENTAÇÃO RETRATADA NO CINEMA: CONTRIBUTO DAS REPRESENTAÇÕES SOCIAISaquario

The aim of this study is to survey and analyze the social representations of cinema viewers regarding the food portrayed in films. Google Forms was used to raise on Facebook the testimony of people who like cinema about the food portrayed in this communicational and artistic medium. The answers about the most cited film were interpreted by content analysis, using the theory of social representations as a theoretical framework. The sample consists of 35 participants, 89.9% women and 11.1% men. There were 16 films that came to mind and the most mentioned was Babette's Feast (26.47%). Two categories were raised: preparing the food and serving the food. At the Babette’s Feast, food first enters restrictions, suitable for the small village, reflecting the conservative and religious parameters of the two sisters, being only a source of food. The use of the theory of social representations allowed us to study in the film Babette's Feast the social realities, the phenomena that involve some fundamental characteristics of daily life and those phenomena that disturb people's routines. The social representations about food for people who like cinema emerge when the food is transformed into tasty food, shared between people. The innovative and previously unattainable flavor portrayed at the Babette’s Feast brings the importance of food, meals as a cultural and social act of integration, memory, innovation, sharing, sociability, subjectivity and individual and social transformation through food preparations and tastings.

What Does the Bible Say? A Critical Conversation with Popular Culture in a Biblically Illiterate World ed. by Mary Ann Beavis and Hyeran Kim-cragg

Reviewed by: What Does the Bible Say? A Critical Conversation with Popular Culture in a Biblically Illiterate World ed. by Mary Ann Beavis and Hyeran Kim-cragg Gordon H. Matties mary ann beavis and hyeran kim-cragg, What Does the Bible Say? A Critical Conversation with Popular Culture in a Biblically Illiterate World ( Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017). Pp. xvi + 186. Paper $25. "The Bible says," a popular expression in some circles, needs elucidation. Professors in universities and seminaries lament biblical illiteracy. For better or worse, movies and television shape religious and theological understandings. This book aims, therefore, to offer a critical perspective on a variety of contested theological and ethical topics, along with contemporary film. The authors bring their expertise to the conversation, with Mary Ann Beavis as biblical scholar and HyeRan Kim-Cragg as practical theologian. They write to teach and to warn. [End Page 721] The authors are concerned that growing biblical illiteracy is giving way to "dangerous" and "harmful" interpretations that foster "Fundamentalism or Anti-Semitism or … facile rejection of Christianity." In offering their perspective on "what the Bible actually says," the authors contest "how the Bible is being used, abused, and misused to oppress, exclude, and judge," and offer "other ways of reading" (pp. xi-xii). The authors are writing primarily for "Christian faith communities today," some of whom were drawn into conversation in small groups (church groups, student groups, women's groups) who viewed and discussed the movies together with the authors (p. xiv). The authors are worried that "lack of knowledge" among people in those communities will become "a chain that constrains us, makes us docile, and leads us to a cynical (or overly rosy) view of the Bible or the world or both" (p. xii). The book is a resource for those wrestling with, or even curious about, some of the pervasive themes and issues of our time. The authors hope that "knowing what the Bible really says or does not say, helps us to slip out of the chains of misinformation, which may in turn liberate us to find new insights in order to live out the faithful life" (p. xii; italics original). They suggest that their approach is "counter-cultural" in its challenging "popular understandings and misperceptions as disseminated in … film, advertising, television, etc." (p. xiv). The authors wish to expose and challenge simplistic readings of biblical texts and to offer alternatives that are healthy and hopeful. The first two chapters deal with easily misunderstood theological topics. Chapter 1, "Creation and Apocalypse," brings seven biblical creation texts into conversation with one another and with Miyazaki's film Princess Mononoke (1997). In chap. 2, the authors challenge popular notions of sin and salvation, particularly the concept of "original sin," while engaging with the film Jesus of Montreal (1989). Chapters 3 and 4 explore the critical issues of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism through explication of "Moses and Jesus" and "Jews and Christians" in the Bible. The movies Prince of Egypt (1998) and The Chosen (1981) are contemporary conversation partners. In chaps. 5, 6, and 7 B. and K.-C. turn to the themes "Heaven and Hell," "God and Satan," and "Christ and Antichrist." The authors challenge the binary articulations of those topics in some contemporary readings of the Bible. Their engagement with Heaven Is for Real (2014), Spiderman II (2004), and Agora (2012) shows how popular cultural productions reinforce misguided biblical interpretation. Chapter 8, "Gender and God," challenges the practice of male-oriented language for God and offers the movie Babette's Feast (1986) for constructive insight. In chap. 9, "Purity and Sex," the authors question the idea that the Bible offers clear teaching on sexual purity and suggest, instead, that notions of honor and shame better reflect the cultural assumptions of biblical texts. The movie The Virgin Suicides (1999) provides a dark and challenging dialogue partner. Chapter 10, a bookend to the two opening theologically oriented chapters, challenges theology that associates Jesus's crucifixion with an overly simplistic understanding of sacrifice and atonement, and offers thoughtful reflection on The Passion of the Christ (2004) and Chocolat (2000). Although the book provides nuanced exegesis, the authors could have reflected more on the...

On Food, Faith, and Psychoanalysis: Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast

Isak Dinesen's novella Babette's Feast tells the story of how a small, quarrelsome Lutheran community in Norway comes to be transformed by the arrival of a stranger, the French cook Babette. In her deceptively simple tale, Dinesen adopts explicitly Eucharistic language and imagery to convey the connection between eating and faith, exploring via rich use of metaphor the way in which we come to be inhabited and nourished by the other. In this paper, I follow Dinesen's sacramental perspective by offering the Catholic notion of transubstantiation as a model for furthering psychoanalytic theorizing about the presence of the other within. Following an outline of Dinesen's story, I draw on work by Freud, Abraham and Torok, and Kristeva to explore differing notions of unconscious identification, incorporation and the metaphorical basis of subjectivity. I develop these ideas through a discussion of the central celebratory dinner given by Babette and conclude by considering some of the implications of the story for psychoanalytic practice.

Establishing Community in Hybrid Courses

The context: I use this strategy in all of my hybrid courses, which are composed of 50 percent face-to-face and 50 percent online contact hours. The courses consist of ten to fifteen students, most of whom are preparing for ordained or lay ministry. The pedagogical purpose: Students are given the opportunity to meet and interact with one another and to form and lock in relationships, in order to form a strong sense of community within the learning environment of the hybrid course. Description of the strategy: In the face-to-face sessions of all my hybrid courses, I intentionally replace lecturing and traditional modes of seminar discussion with community building activities. The following activities that I use are designed to simultaneously cover course material and establish community: student-led plenary prayer, aesthetic small group assignments (for example, each small group creates a poem, play, drawing, or song based on course material), field trips, movie viewing, peer-collaboration to design innovative programs for their ministries, and small-group sharing of “in-the-field” ministerial tactics. When the face-to-face session is long enough (over two hours is ideal), I encourage students to bring snacks or food for a meal to share in pot-luck style. In each course, I tailor any one of these activities to suit the material we cover. For example, in my Sacraments course, when we watch the film, Babette's Feast (Orion, 1987), and discuss the “sacramental principle,” I ask the students to bring a food that signifies something important about themselves they wish to share with the class. Why it is effective: In a hybrid learning environment, wherein face-to-face contact hours are reduced by at least half of those in “traditional” courses, supporting a sense of community is critical. Especially at the beginning of the course, before venturing out into disembodied cyberspace, students need to feel connected to their peers and to their instructor. Sustained community building activities allow for real-time personal interactions, which utilize a range of multiple intelligences. The activities also establish a positive environment for collaborative learning, thereby enhancing the quality of social presence in discussion forums and virtual prayer rooms in the online component of the course. Students also have a clearer sense of the instructor's expectations, because they have personally interacted with the instructor and have witnessed the instructor's facilitation of various and diverse classroom activities and dynamics. Ultimately, the community building activities display to students in formation a mode of integrating their intellectual understandings of course material with their interpersonal, spiritual, and pastoral growth.

You Cannot Be in Love with a Word: Theologies of Embodiment in Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc", Axel's "Babette's Feast" and von Trier's "Breaking the Waves"

My article investigates the representation and significance of the suffering female body in three films by Danish male directors operating in a religious framework: Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Axel’s Babette’s Feast (1987) and von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996). In these films the visual level complements the narrative level in order to accentuate the heroines’ physical suffering, often in a manner which is particularly poignant. More specifically, my analysis will point out the ways in which the body is brought into the foreground in each film and valorised against the backdrop of a confrontation between the body as pathos and the word as logos. Dreyer’s images and close-ups use the potentialities of the body to suggest the spiritual chasm between Joan of Arc and her judges. Moreover, the opposition between Joan and the theologians is also rendered in terms of the opposition between the oral and the written word, from which she is excluded. Hers is the embodied word and the passion; the subjective experience of embodied suffering becomes a test for her truth. With Babette’s Feast we move into a Lutheran pietistic background but the action is still played out in terms of Protestant – Catholic worldviews. Here the suffering of the body is toned down in a symbolic representation. Babette’s feast is actually an act of self-giving, her own body being offered to the others, symbolized by the cailles en sarcophages she prepares for the consumption of the community. Bess in Breaking the Waves challenges directly the theological foundations of the Calvinist faith of the community, opposing their veneration of the word as the letter of the Bible with an existential dedication to the embodied Word and the immediate consequences this has for human relationships. Like Joan, Bess lays bare the mechanics of power which becomes violently inscribed on her body.

Babette's Feast and the Goodness of God

Babette's Feast and the Goodness of God

The Pleasure of Food, and the Spiritual: Eat, Pray, Love and Babette's Feast

Summary This article explores the significance of the enjoyment of food in relation to spirituality, as (re)presented in two texts -Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love (2007) and the cinematic version of Karen Blixen's novel Babette's Feast (1987). It is argued that the pleasure derived from food occupies a crucial position in both texts, firstly in its own “hedonistic” right, but secondly also as far asit functions allegorically (Babette's Feast), or temporally (Eat, Pray, Love) regarding the (re)presentation of spiritually significant experience. That is, the enjoyment of food is (re)presented as a means of repeating (and perhaps anticipating) spiritually meaningful culinary experience (Babette's Feast). In Eat, Pray, Love, the spiritual awakening of the protagonist, in the “dark night of her soul”, is succeeded by a kind of “carnival”, followed by something resembling the Lent of the Christian tradition. Hence, her journey through space and time takes her from sensuous (though celibate) pleasure in food (Eat) to spiritual sacrifice (Pray) and eventually romantic love (Love). The narrative logic of this sequence, it is argued, consists in sensuous, culinary enjoyment preparing her for the meaning of sacrifice through spiritual commitment. These two phases of her journey, or existential quest, become intertwined (their complex interlacement being constituted by a kind of interpenetration of pleasure and sacrifice through commitment).

An interpretation of Babette's Feast as a parable of trauma

In this paper I use the film Babette's Feast as a parable to portray the impasse that often arises out of the experience of complex trauma. The experience of such trauma invokes a crisis of reality. It overflows the boundaries of rational containment. There are no mechanisms with which to apprehend such an event, and consequently it cannot be comprehended; because it cannot be comprehended it cannot be processed. The film Babette's Feast encapsulates the predicament of the individual ensnared in the web of trauma. Although removed from the location and events of her trauma, Babette remains the resident of an austere and colourless environment, her gifts repressed, her brilliance unseen. Healing comes to Babette through her willingness to revisit her true self, a self that has been crushed under the weight of grief and trauma. This revisiting costs her all she has. Yet, it is in this revisiting that she not only frees herself from the austerity of her environment but also engenders purpose and hope within the community who have taken her in. The dissonance of her life is paralleled by the dissonance of the life of the community in which she lives; it is the harmonizing of these dissonances which cannot be spoken that finally gives articulation to the incoherence of Babette's trauma.

Mythic Realism: Magic and Mystery in Marele Day's Lambs of God

Lambs of God is a bizarre novel penned by an unlikely author. A popular mystery writer, Marele Day describes being motivated by a somewhat experimental curiosity. She describes how theoretically I wondered what would happen if you took a group of people out of contact with rest of world, because I realized that if you leave things alone and don't interfere they generally go back to earth .... So stones we pick up from ground and put into a vertical fashion to build houses and high rises, if you leave them alone they will eventually crumble, and I wondered if that would happen to people as well. (qtd. in Margetts 2) The resulting novel has a somewhat odd premise: three aging nuns live a materially impoverished yet spiritually rich existence in a crumbling island monastery, which a pragmatic priest wants to sell. Whether these characters crumble or, instead, somehow flourish through goodness of creation depends on Day's success in creating a Christian mythic realist text. The novel was an immediate hit, published not only in Day's native Australia but also United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Spain, and Netherlands. Nominated for an International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, it has been praised for its universal resonance (Atkins 1), its strange interweaving of comic and mystical [that] is simply divine (Corrigan B12), its acute view of women and men, worldliness and transcendence (Great Reads D7), and its success in convinc[ing] us that lives of principals have changed forever (Wolfe 50). However, other critics were disturbed by its presentation of corrupted Catholic liturgy (Hughes 18) and a bastardized sort of Catholicism (Treneman 19). Though as a writer Marele Day is known neither for her attention to religion or spirituality nor for artistic experimentation associated with magical realism, I argue that in Lambs of God she combines two to create an unusual synthesis that effectively offers its readers a Christian comedy created in large part through magical realist literary devices. Comedy affirms life; while acknowledging that human experience does not unfold exactly as one might wish, comic world view always concludes that life is good and is worth living. In a Christian comic world view, goodness of life is affirmed most universally in sacramentality of creation and most concretely in myth of Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. Such a world view does not deny life's struggles, but sees their meaning as derived from Christian myth. Christian literature ranging from grittiness of Graham Greene's The Power and Glory or Georges Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest, to far less dark The Tree of Man by Patrick White, Evensong by Gail Godwin, or Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen, offers a comic world view that emerges from attention to Christian myth and its temporal manifestation in Christian ritual. This is basis of Alejandro Garcia-Rivera's understanding of theological aesthetics: an appreciation of representations of the fullness of cosmos (172) that both transcends merely material aspects of life and integrates them into a deeply spiritual engagement with beauty and creation. What is particularly interesting about Day's novel is not merely its presentation of the fullness of cosmos through its reliance on Christian myth, but its employment of magical realist devices to achieve this. Far from being associated with Christian myth, magical realism tends to focus on political. Certainly magical realist literature--especially that of Latin America--is peppered with references to Christianity and its representatives, but these tend to be either mere elements of cultural landscape or agents of colonial oppression. For example, priests abound in Isabel Allende's The House of Spirits, ranging from judgmental Father Restrepo, to kindly if rather inept Father Antonio, to Father Jose Dulce Maria, who transform [s] biblical parables into Socialist propaganda (137). …

Food in Films: A Star Is Born

Although food has been part of motion pictures since the silent era, for the most part it has been treated with about as much respect as movie extras: it's always been there on the screen but seldom noticed –– that is until the 1970s and 1980s when food's photogenic qualities were discovered by a handful of filmmakers who made food a star, thus giving birth to a new genre: food films. To document how food has been treated in movies from the silent era to the present, the author reviewed over 800 American and foreign films. This article, excerpted from the enlarged and updated second edition of the author's book, Food in the Movies, to be released in November, 2009, highlights some of the significant technological, cinematic and cultural forces at work over the past century that helped give birth to as many as thirty food films released in the past thirty years. Some of the more popular ones include: Tampopo (1986), Babette's Feast, (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), Big Night (1996), Mostly Martha (2001), and most recently No Reservations (2007). The article also provides a behind-the-scene look at the extraordinary culinary efforts required to prepare the sumptuous dishes we see on the screen.

Drinks and Dinner with Kierkegaard

APPLYING SOREN KIERKEGAARD'S and religious categories to the interpretation of literature can be revealing; in some cases they are truly illuminative. Not that the authors of the works had to be directly inspired by Kierkegaard, or even know anything about his way of sorting human lifestyles. These Kier-kegaardian ideas not only turn out to be dramatic lenses exposing the meaning of choices the literary characters make; the stories and plays in turn may enlarge and deepen the categories. I want to offer such an approach to T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party and Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast, where something like Kierkegaard's three stages are strikingly present as dramatic determinants. All that in due time. First we must grasp, basically, what the celebrated three labels mean in the works of Kierkegaard. Aesthetic, Ethical, Religious The way of being sounds attractive and it is, but it is at the same time severely limited. As its name implies, it is related to the life of the senses, and just for that reason, quite able to appreciate the beautiful in many of its forms. It is where we think of freedom as keeping all options open, and where we live for what is pleasant, where good times are most important, and where we thirst for the new and interesting. The pursuit of pleasure, or conquest, or the new, or all of the above has its heroes, such as Don Giovanni. Kierkegaard writes a compelling commentary on Mozart's opera by that name where he claims that the music perfectly expresses the wonderful energy and high spirits of the erotic quest as lived by the hero, who flies above all questions about paying the piper. (1) The seduced women, to say nothing of the Comendatore, do line up to force payment, and Don Giovanni has to run faster and faster to stay ahead of them all. Yet the women, like all of us, are attracted to this life-force, this ebullience, and prefer it to bourgeois doldrums. There are darker expressions of the aesthetic, such as the chilling Diary of a Seducer. (2) Or, adding our own example by anticipation, there are less energetic, simply more compromised versions, as in a settled bourgeois style that finds what meaning there might be in diversions such as cocktail parties. Naturally there are commitments here, but they are weak and not of the essence. The key point is that the aesthetic is a fundamentally selfish style where people are easily wounded and equally easily elated by the sensuous immediate. Time is a string of interesting, amusing, or pleasant events, the continuity supplied only by a controlling ego that inevitably fears death as the end of the string. The aesthetic person has not grown up to the ethical. It is just the ethical grown-ups who would make that judgment of course, and we might want to take it cum grano salis. The ethical level, however, is not as boring as it might sound. It is where we dig in, in serious commitment, where that commitment is deep and honest enough to completely redirect life toward the fruitfulness that can result. Marriage and family are the paradigm here, and Kierkegaard's most well-known exposition, indirect as usual, is found in the second volume of Either/Or. The loyalties of the ethical can go quite far, a long way past the comfort zone we might think of as characteristic of it in its bourgeois aspect. Kierkegaard considers Greek tragedy the highest expression of the ethical, as in Antigone's fierce determination to bury her brother whatever the cost. Her life is not, to put it mildly, about having a good time; it is about fidelity to a deeply held value. Time here is not measured out in coffee spoons; it gathers to greatness through the unfolding of a commitment to a deeply held value. The religious is something else again, though it is in a way prepared for by the ethical so that sometimes Kierkegaard will speak of the ethico-religious. If on the aesthetic level we live from an egoistic point of view, the ethical takes us into the realm of law and the universal, the Kantian imperative: if I don't think others should be doing x then I shouldn't do it either. …

“Deeper Down in the Domain of Human Hearts”: Hope in Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast

ISAK DINESEN'S BABETTE'S FEAST was first published 1950 Ladies' Home Journal. Dinesen, Danish writer, had heard that Americans were interested stories about food. So when she wrote short piece for an American audience, she centered transformative action of story on splendid meal. (1) About twenty years before Babette's Feast was published, German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote work titled Meaning of Courage. He was encouraged by publisher to write treatises on seven virtues, to which he responded with great enthusiasm, publishing On Hope 1935. (2) How much I, basically unsuspecting, had fallen into simply inexhaustible theme, which had been capable of sketching only outline at best, became clear to me quite soon, Pieper notes. (3) Nevertheless, theme of hope has not been focus of much philosophical inquiry aside from Kant; as Bernard N. Schumacher notes, history of philosophy, hope has never been dominant theme; it was generally treated, if at all, 'incidentally,' just as it continues to be treated today among majority of philosophers. (4) Yet experience of hope is fundamental to human condition; loss of hope for an individual or for community can be devastating. In an insightful essay on Pieper's work, Gilbert Meilaender notes that what is right requires being good, but we can become good only by doing what is ... [Pieper's] discussion leaves us to wrestle with problem: how to hand on moral society which often fails to inculcate doing of what is right. (5) This is crux of tension and discord Dinesen's Babette's Feast: moral has not permeated community. Their religious leader, known narrative as Dean, has died, and his disciples were becoming fewer number every year, whiter or balder and harder of hearing. (6) The congregation remembers Dean's message but individual members have trouble living it out. They sing hymns, study Dean's writings, and gather for worship services, but nevertheless sad little schisms would arise (BF, 3-4). The Dean's daughters, although they live virtuous lives, have been unsuccessful hand[ing] on moral knowledge to community. The example of their lives--selfless, giving, and nurturing--is not enough to provide spiritual transformative direction. This is community adrift, group of professed believers who have lost their way. In Babette's Feast, Dinesen offers fictional example of ways which individuals and communities can recover hope. (7) The dramatic restoration of hope to this community occurs at end of story during an elegant feast that servant/artist/chef, Babette, prepares and serves. (8) Babette is an outsider. She is French, she is political exile, and she is Roman Catholic. The narrator tells us that it is indeed strange thing for a couple of Puritan women small Norwegian to have French maid-of-all-work (BF, 22). The people this small mountain town of Berlevaag, Norway, find explanation for Babette's presence in sisters' piety and kindness of heart (ibid.). This is partially true; sisters had taken Babette when she threw herself on their doorstep twelve years ago, cold, wet, and penniless, a friendless fugitive, almost mad with grief and fear (ibid.). However, narrator tells us early story that the true reason for Babette's presence two sisters' house was to be found further back time and deeper down domain of human hearts (ibid.), statement that resonates and echoes throughout story, and further reveals Dinesen's approach. Speaking of her narrative technique general, she writes, I know whole story before writing first word. actually carry my stories my head for long time, before write them. tell them and retell them to myself. (9) Babette's Feast moves back and forth time so that feast can be understood as an elaborate palimpsest for participants, chef, and readers. …

Food, film, and culture: a genre study

Culinary imagery, much like sexual and violent imagery, is a key cinematic device used to elicit a sensory response from an audience. In many films, culinary imagery is central enough to define a new subgenre, defined by films in which food production, preparation, service and consumption play a major part in the development of character, structure or theme. This book defines the food film genre, and analyzes the relationship between cinematic food imagery and various cultural constructs, including politics, family, identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender and religion. Chapters examine these themes in several well-known food films, such as Cook, Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Chocolat, Babette's Feast, and Eat Drink Man Woman, and lesser-known productions, including Felicia's Journey, Kitchen Stories, Magic Kitchen, and Chinese Feast. The work includes a filmography of movies within the food genre.

The Defiance of Patriarchy and the Creation of a Female Literary Tradition in Contemporary World Popular Fiction

Laura Esquivel, Mexican, Joanne Harris, British, Fannie Flagg, American, and Isak Dinesen, Danish, are women writers who have written contemporary world popular fiction: Like Water for Chocolate, Chocolat, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, and the short story 'Babette's Feast'. Out of their desire to reflect their female identity, these women writers of four different nationalities have concertedly rejected the long-running male literary tradition, in which male characters rule and dominate and, in turn, have created a female literary tradition in which their female characters not only assert a solid and secure place in the world but also are allowed to display their female strength, resourcefulness and dominance. These contemporary women writers have brought about significant changes in contemporary fiction in which they terminate literary stereotypes and discard traditional female roles and 'untrue ' images imposed on women. These women authors reduce the male role, ridicule male characters and reverse male authority. While lessening the male role, they increase the female role, make female characters the focus of their works, and reverse former traditional practice by portraying male characters as marginal, subordinate or complementary to female interests and desires. Besides, rather than penalizing 'bad girls' these authors reward 'bad girls' and in some cases allow them to prevail in the end. The women writers, furthermore, step over the boundary into the domain of art and create female characters who take the role of accomplished artists. Theme-wise these authors determinedly deal with such distinctive feminine concerns as food, cooking, and nurturing, traditionally treated as trivial and unimportant, by drawing attention to their universal significance and elevating them to serious literary subject matter.

Archeology of female cannibalism: Slavenka Drakulić's novel Divine Hunger

Along with other texts like Samuel Beckett's Dante and the Lobster or Tania Blixen's Babette's Feast and films like Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe or Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Slavenka Drakulić's Croatian novel Divine Hunger ( Božanska glad, 1995) is a paradigm of how a somatic discourse can unfold on various levels, differing in semantic reach. The theme of “female cannibalism”, developed on the denotative level of a transgressive “amour-fou”-tale and perverting the signs for love and death, is revealed as a code for several subtexts or connotative readings: – for a reading, centring on the concepts of gender and postcolonial history; – for a philosophical and psychological subtext, concerning concepts of identity, dependency and incorporation of the Other (master-slave-relation); and last but not least – for a political subtext, based on the concepts of power, nation, aggression and annexation.

Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine

By Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Chicago — London, University of Chicago Press, 2004. 272 pp. Hb £27.50; $25.00. Parkhurst Ferguson's study proposes a ‘genealogy and geography of culinary culture’, using sociological, historical and literary analyses ‘to track French identity from its beginning in the seventeenth century through its elaboration over the nineteenth and into the twentieth’. This ambitious historical and methodological sweep leads to a long definition of terms and objectives. Asserting that the stories the French tell about cuisine attest to its emblematic status, Parkhurst Ferguson then traces the development of French cuisine to the nineteenth century, identifying this as the time when it became textual product, providing a cohesive sense of national identity based on values of excellence and superiority. Dipping into cookbooks, menus, essays, journalism, poems and novels, she maps out a culinary constellation of the nineteenth century, describing the contribution of deliciously colourful figures to the consitution of French cuisine as a vehicle for collective identity. She repositions the illustrious chef Carême as a culinary modern who provided a grammar and a lexicon for the haute cuisine of the Ancien Régime, allowing the sense of ‘Frenchness’ it symbolized to spread from Paris to province and thence worldwide. The focus then shifts from the individual to the broad culture of the nineteenth century, and from producer to consumer, identifying a new social practice — gastronomy — and role of the text in reconfiguring food as sensual object and symbolic value. Brillat-Savarin, author of La Physiologie du goût, is described as turning gastronomy into a subject of philosophical and social interest, and journalist Grimod de la Reynière, as a pedagogue spreading the new culinary discourse of identity. Literary references predictably include Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Parkhurst Ferguson also elucidates how Proust's culinary nostalgia in A la recherche du temps perdu encapsulates a nineteenth-century ‘ideal of nation in culturally specific terms’. In Rouff's contrasting 1924 novel, La Vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant-Gourmet, she similarly identifies an assertion of superiority that harks back to the ideal of stable cultural specificity articulated by nineteenth-century culinary discourses. Indeed, analyses of texts from or evoking the nineteenth century are the study's strength, and the account of the subsequent development of the narrative of French cuisine is less comprehensive. The impact of globalization and internationalization is briefly mentioned, but not recent debate on la malbouffe. Parkhurst Ferguson's assertion that local sourcing and fresh preparation are the contemporary guarantors, albeit vulnerable, of French cuisine is paradoxically overshadowed by descriptions focusing on conspicuous consumption in North America. Analysis of the success of the Japanese ‘Iron Chef’ on the Food Network and field work predominantly featuring US-based chefs may put readers unfamiliar with American food culture at a comparative disadvantage. Thus, with its concluding analysis of Danish director Gabriel Axel's film, Babette's Feast, the study ends at some distance from its point of departure. None the less, Parkhurst Ferguson's analysis of the links between text, gastronomy and nation in nineteenth-century France whets the appetite for further investigation of the cultural currency of French cuisine, its textualization and its contribution to narratives of French identity.

Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson (review)

MLRy 100.3, 2??5 837 Analysis of Beckett's manuscript notebooks and correspondence, forexample, would have revealed some nuances of his own fascination with both Pensees and Reveries. (One key passage from the Pensees, cited by Loevlie (p. 208), is even copied by Beckett into his 'Whoroscope' notebook, adorned with his own revelatory underlinings.) These cross-comparisons will, however, safely keep foranother day. Overall, Loevlie's study is rich in insight, and, fora study which espouses silence, seductively eloquent. Cardiff University Mary Bryden Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. By Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2004. xiv + 258 pp. ?17.50; $25. ISBN 0-226-24323-0. Priscilla Ferguson defines gastronomy as 'a given practice of consumption [. . .] the systematic socially valorized pursuit of culinary creativity' (p. 84). Invoking Bourdieu 's concept of field, she analyses French gastronomy as 'material product and the critical, intellectual, and aesthetic by-products that [.. .] debate that original product' (p. 105). It attained its French apotheosis in the nineteenth century when a succession of three monarchies, three republics, and two empires between 1789 and 1871, and the concomitant military occupationsby England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, favoured an exigent and eclectic culinary culture. Haute cuisine became democratized. By the 1820s Paris had over three thousand restaurants competing forcustom. Gourmandise, the seventh deadly sin, wins the accolade for its socio-economic benefits in Eugene Sue's eponymous novel (1848). The opening chapter 'Culinary Configurations' (pp. 15-48) argues that the seven? teenth-century formalization of the French language facilitated the Cartesian codification of method that underpins its cuisine. In the eighteenth century Brillat-Savarin was both martinet of technique and populist, wooing readers with discourses on the aphrodisiacal truffleand wild American turkey. Chapter 2 on that Palladio of pastry, Careme, (1783-1833), with his passion iorpieces montees,outlines a practical and the? oretical reconfiguration of sumptuous culinary code founded upon social utility.His voluminous publications on all aspects of the culinary art preserved his creations for posterity. Amongst the many legendary feats deploying his logistical skills one may single out the feast for 10,000 guests at the Allied celebrations afterNapoleon's defeat (p. 58). Chapter 3, 'Readings in a Culinary Culture' (pp. 83-110), analyses Grimod de la Reyniere's work, Fourier's curious gastrosophy, and Balzac's gastrolatry. Chap? ter 4, 'Food Nostalgia' (pp. 111-48), scrutinizes specific texts in order to reinforce the thesis that the literary-culinary link is quintessentially French. A quibble: Zola is under-represented with one reference (p. 113). The emblematic skull and crossbones of Les Halles, whose produce Zola evokes in dazzling metaphor, constitutes the indispensable pendant to Careme's preciosity. Proust's A la recherchedu tempsperdu points the dynamics between the provinces and Paris. Francoise's careful selections of appropriate freshseasonal produce and Albertine's exuberant panegyric of Ritz ice creams illustrate delightfully the virtuosity of French culinary writing. Chapter 5, 'Consuming Passions' (pp. 149-86), updates the survey by focusing on modern New York. Gastro-voyeurism reigns as top chefs compete for French-style stars, and the Japanese Iron Chef with his aggressive humour enjoys cult status on TV (pp. 160-65). The epilogue (pp. 187-201) on the film Babette's Feast maintains that the French tradition still shapes the West's culinary conscience. Babette, once head chef at the Cafe Anglais in Paris, uses her lotterywinnings to cook its spectacular signature dish, entombed quail, forher adopted Danish community at a sacramental last meal. Although she is bankrupting herself on the altar of culinary art, the banquet accomplishes her exalted purpose of building a convivial community. 838 Reviews While the case for France's global dominance may remain not proven, Ferguson offershere a fascinatingly differentslant on France's perennial love affairwith food. University of Glasgow Elizabeth Moles The Vision ofDante: Cary's Translation of 'The Divine Comedy'. By Edoardo Crisafulli . Market Harborough: Troubador. 2003. xii + 348 pp. ?25; ?13.99. ISBN 1-899293-09-4. H. F. Cary's translation of Dante into Miltonic blank verse was one of the most culturally significant productions of nineteenth-century Britain. Writers as different as John Keats and John Ruskin carried it...

Catching light: looking for God in the movies

Films have come to not only entertain modern minds but also inform and shape them. Many of the best cinematic works have profound religious elements -- some obvious, some more subtle. In Catching Light Roy Anker examines nineteen popular films, showing how they convey a range of striking perspectives on the human encounter with God. These selected films portray God showing up in different, surprising ways amid the messy circumstances of life. Anker looks closely at the plot of each film, especially at how characters, through their experiences, ultimately move Light, toward recognition of a loving, redemptive deity. first section of Catching Light looks at classic 1970s films that inspect personal, social, and cultural evil: The Godfather trilogy, Chinatown, and The Deer Hunter. second group of films depicts the ways and depths of specifically Christian notions of redemption: Tender Mercies, Mission, Places in the Heart, and Babette's Feast. Some of the most successful films of our time have come as fairy-tale fantasies: the Star Wars saga, Superman, and three of Steven Spielberg's lost boy stories (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: Extra-Terrestrial, and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence), each of which Anker interprets as a fable of search and redemption. films in the last section of the book feature characters who, to their great surprise, are ambushed by a wholly unexpected God: Grand Canyon, American Beauty, and Three Colors: Blue. In addition to focusing on the theological dimension of each film, Anker comments on its merits both as story and as cinema. Also included are sidebars that discuss each film's history and significance as well as the quality and special features of DVD editions. For anyone interested in the intersection of religion, art, and culture, Catching Light offers a unique view of contemporary faith.