Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T19:54:34.340Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 1 - Commensality

from Part I - Origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
Get access

Summary

Literary and historical studies have tended to focus primarily on what social scientists call the culinary, or the “what of eating”—the food on our plates, how it got there, and what it does to us. But of equal importance is the commensal, or the “how of eating”—how acts of sharing food help construct self-other relationships, group interactions, and indeed whole societies. This essay considers the role of commensality in literature through several lenses, using illustrations from works from the Greeks to the contemporary period. Texts discussed include Plato’s Gorgias, Aristophanes’ Knights, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare’s plays, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and Anita Desai’s Fasting, Feasting.
Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Allhoff, Fritz, and Monroe, Dave, eds. Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think, and Be Merry. 1st ed. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007.Google Scholar
Andersen, Boris. “Commensality between the Young.” In Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, edited by Kerner, Susanne, Chou, Cynthia, and Warmind, Morten, 4350. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Angelella, Lisa. “The Meat of the Movement: Food and Feminism in Woolf.” Woolf Studies Annual 17 (2011): 173–95.Google Scholar
Aristophanes, . The Birds and Other Plays. London: Penguin, 2003.Google Scholar
Barker, Francis, Hulme, Peter, and Iversen, Margaret. Cannibalism and the Colonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1. New York: Zone Books, 1991.Google Scholar
Benis, Toby. Romantic Diasporas: French Émigrés, British Convicts, and Jews. New York: Palgrave, 2009.Google Scholar
Berry, Wendell. “The Pleasures of Eating.” In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited by Wirzba, Norman, 321–27. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002.Google Scholar
Borroff, Marie, trans. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New York: Norton, 1967.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Benson, Larry Dean. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.Google Scholar
Chee-Beng, Tan. “Commensality and the Organization of Social Relations.” In Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, edited by Kerner, Susanne, Chou, Cynthia, and Warmind, Morten, 1330. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curtin, Deane W., and Heldke, Lisa M.. Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Cadava, Eduardo, Connor, Peter, and Nancy, Jean-Luc, 96119. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Desai, Anita. Fasting, Feasting. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 2004.Google Scholar
Douglas, Mary. “Standard Social Uses of Food: Introduction.” In Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities, edited by Douglas, Mary, 139. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1978.Google Scholar
Fischler, Claude. “Commensality, Society and Culture.” Social Science Information 50.3–4 (2011): 528–48. doi:10.1177/0539018411413963.Google Scholar
Fischler, Claude, and Masson, Estelle. Manger: Français, Européens et Américains face à l’alimentation. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008.Google Scholar
Goldstein, David B. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Goldstein, David B.Emmanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating.” Gastronomica 10.3 (Summer 2010): 3444.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Grignon, Claude. “Commensality and Social Morphology: An Essay of Typology.” In Food, Drink and Identity: Cooking, Eating and Drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages, edited by Scholliers, Peter, 2333. Oxford: Berg, 2001.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.Google Scholar
Harris, Siân. “Glorious Food? The Literary and Culinary Heritage of the Harry Potter Series.” In J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter, edited by Hallett, Cynthia J. and Huey, Peggy J., 821. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.Google Scholar
Heldke, Lisa M. “Foodmaking as Thoughtful Practice.” In Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, edited by Curtin, Deane W. and Heldke, Lisa M., 203–29. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Jones, Martin. Feast: Why Humans Share Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Kaplan, David M. The Philosophy of Food. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Keeling, Kara K., and Pollard, Scott T., eds. Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2009.Google Scholar
Kilgour, Maggie. From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Korsmeyer, Carolyn. Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Lestringant, Frank. Cannibals. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.Google Scholar
Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.Google Scholar
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990.Google Scholar
McGee, Diane. Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.Google Scholar
McNulty, Tracy. The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Meigs, Anna. “Food as a Cultural Construction.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Counihan, Carole and Esterik, Penny Van. New York: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Nestle, Marion. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Plato, . Gorgias. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Plato, . “Phaedo.” In The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Hamilton, Edith and Cairns, Huntington, translated by Hugh Tredennick. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Plato, . The Symposium. Translated by Walter Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1951.Google Scholar
Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006.Google Scholar
Purohit, Swami Shree, and Yeats, W. B., trans. The Ten Principal Upanishads. London: Faber and Faber, 1970.Google Scholar
Rosenblum, Jordan. Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.Google Scholar
Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.Google Scholar
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Edited by Dusinberre, Juliet. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Braunmuller, A. R.. New York: Penguin, 2001.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism, Rewritings and Appropriations. Edited by Marcus, Leah S.. New York: Norton, 2005.Google Scholar
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Edited by Hunter, J. Paul. New York: Norton, 2012.Google Scholar
Smith, William Robertson. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. A. & C. Black, 1907.Google Scholar
Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997.Google Scholar
Tigner, Amy L., and Allison, Carruth. Literature and Food Studies. New York: Routledge, 2018.Google Scholar
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Tsing, Anna. “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.Environmental Humanities 1 (2012): 141–54.Google Scholar
Van Esterik, Penny. “Care, Caregiving and Caretakers.Food and Nutrition Bulletin 16.4 (1995): 378–88.Google Scholar
Van Esterik, Penny. “Commensal Circles and the Common Pot.” In Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, edited by Kerner, Susanne, Chou, Cynthia, and Warmind, Morten, 3142. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957.Google Scholar
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.Google Scholar
Wrangham, Richard W. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books, 2009.Google Scholar
Yates, Julian. “Shakespeare’s Messmates.” In Culinary Shakespeare, edited by Goldstein, David B. and Tigner, Amy L., 179–98. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2016.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×