Abstract
The panel seeks to investigate taste in its many guises: as sensation, aesthetics, style, language, and methodology. Ideas such as “good taste,” “bad taste,” and “acquired taste” provide us with social capital to navigate everyday conversations and social spaces—from restaurants to concert halls, book clubs to museums—demonstrating how value judgments are co-constituted with our sensory engagements. Yet, even as the concept has come to define critical discourses about the arts, conventions in Aristotelian philosophy and aesthetic theory have historically marginalized taste as a “lower” sense for its supposed graphic, feminine, and animalistic nature. What would it mean for us to lean into the concept as an alternative system of knowledge production, as a (dis)organizing principle that contests sensory privilege? Broadening the ways we read for orality and consumption in literature, taste allows us to attend the mouth as an aperture that is receptive to our external surroundings, one that not only speaks, but eats. What exactly do food words, food metaphors, and scenes of feasting do for the literary text and how do they reconfigure the relationship between word and world? If we can think of taste as an inclusive modality that exceeds spaces and practices of sensory regulation, how does it attend to the embodied specificities of sexuality, race, gender, and class? This panel invites papers on the idea of reading as consumption; the “natural” alignment of taste to certain genders and bodies; aesthetic abstraction; synesthesia in literature; food ekphrasis.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2022 Special Focus—Imagining the Edible: Food, Creativity, and the Arts
KEYWORDS
Taste, Aesthetics, Literature, Synesthesia
