As part of the

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON FOOD REPRESENTATION IN THE HUMANITIES, FILM AND THE ARTS

at
The University of Texas
at San Antonio
Downtown Campus

February 25-27, 2010







The John Peace Library Special Collections' Librarian Juli McLoone has curated the

Book Exhibit:
Highlights of the Laure Gruenbeck Mexican Cookbook Collection

at The University of Texas at San Antonio Downtown Campus Library
and
will hold an open Cookbook Reading Room
on
Saturday, February 27, from 9:00 am till noon
at
Buena Vista Building 2.314L


For more information on the John Peace Library Special Collections see: http://lib.utsa.edu/Archives


Pictured: Valdes, Ramona. Cocina práctica: pastelería, repostería, salchichonería, helados. México : Ediciones Botas, 1937. This cookbook is inscribed “A mi amiga Adela French” and signed “Carlos Fernández 2/28/1938.” Several of the recipes include handwritten annotations. An additional recipe for “Fresh Chili Verde” is written on the title page.

Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals. A book review by Steven G. Kellman

               
In Everything Is Illuminated (2002), a character named Jonathan Safran Foer flabbergasts his Ukrainian guide, Alex Perchov. "I'm a vegetarian," the visiting American declares. "I do not understand," Alex replies. A dialogue of mutual incomprehension ensues: "'I don't eat meat.' 'Why not?' 'I just don't.' 'How can you not eat meat?' . . . 'I just don't. No meat.' 'Pork?' 'No.' 'Meat?' 'No meat.' 'Steak?' 'Nope.' 'Chickens?' 'No.' 'Do you eat veal?' 'Oh, God. Absolutely no veal.' 'What about sausage?' 'No sausage either.'" The starving traveler is forced to feast on two potatoes.


               Eating Animals, Foer's first book of nonfiction, answers Perchov's "Why not?" with a more cogent explanation. An apologia pro diaeta sua, it begins in fond remembrance of his grandmother's chicken and carrots. Foer passed through vegetarian interludes throughout adolescence and consumed animal protein only occasionally after he married. When his son was born three years ago, he renounced meat entirely and began this book. Discomforting thoughts of a child gorging on flesh may have inspired Foer to make the nine-year-old narrator of his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), a vegan. Like Leo Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, Foer extends his empathy to nonhuman beings. "For the animals," wrote Isaac Bashevis Singer, another literary vegetarian, "it is an eternal Treblinka."

              Appalled that "upwards of 99 percent of all meat eaten in this country comes from 'factory farms,'" Foer sets out to comprehend what eating animals entails in the stages leading up to consumption. He participates in a clandestine nighttime raid on an industrial turkey operation. The supervisor of a facility where fifty thousand birds share a single shed tells him: "High-yield farming has allowed everyone to eat." Foer examines the price we pay—in environmental devastation, zoonotic pathogens, food-borne toxins, and complicity in atrocity—for cheap meat. Genetically engineered for maximum yield of flesh and profit, billions of pigs, chickens, and cows annually endure torture before their wretched lives are terminated, often painfully. "The factory farm," he concludes, "has succeeded by divorcing people from their food, eliminating farmers, and ruling agriculture by corporate fiat." Eating is applied ethics, and Foer contends that we can act on our values every day by refusing meat.

He visits some remaining family farms, where animals are not debeaked, tail docked, castrated, branded, drugged, or otherwise treated as machines incapable of experiencing agony. He deplores the market forces eliminating both these farms and the few abattoirs where gratuitous cruelty is rare. In its astonishing conclusion, Eating Animals breaks with the growing chorus of philosophers, farm advocates, environmentalists, and nutritionists who advocate for a plant-based diet. Though still a devout vegan, Foer recognizes that most other Americans will continue to eat meat. So out of "the very same impulse that makes [him] personally committed to eschewing meats, eggs, and dairy," he has, through an organization he founded called Farm Forward, begun building humane slaughterhouses. The oxymoronicity would be clearer if, instead of chickens and turkeys, the objects of slaughter were dogs, chimpanzees, or humans, beings we feel more squeamish about killing. "A straightforward case for vegetarianism is worth writing," writes Foer, "but it's not what I've written here." Yet he has, though the implications of what eating animals really entails will be hard for most readers to swallow.

From: Bookforum Dec/Jan 2010

Food Conference Keynote Speaker

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Department of History

College of Liberal and Fine Arts

The University of Texas at San Antonio

announce the

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON

FOOD REPRESENTATION IN THE HUMANITIES, FILM AND THE ARTS

Keynote Speaker
Professor Steven G. Kellman
"The Only Fit Food for a Man is Half a Lemon": Kafka's Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations

Friday, February 26

6:30 pm Aula Canaria

University of Texas at San Antonio

Downtown Campus

With the support of an HEB grant

A professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he has taught since 1976, Steven G. Kellman was UTSA’s first Ashbel Smith Professor (1995-2000). He has also taught at the University of California campuses of Berkeley and Irvine and at Bemidji State Minnesota and Tel-Aviv University. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.A. in English and General Literature from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Sofia and a Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Tbilisi State University and twice served as Partners of the Americas lecturer in Peru. He was twice awarded the UTSA President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in Recognition of Research Excellence (1990-91, 2005-2006) and once received the campus-wide teaching award (1985-86). Kellman has served as John E. Sawyer fellow at Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute and has held an NEH research grant, an NEH grant to South Africa, and a Fulbright-Hays grant to China. He was honored with the 2005 Arts and Letters Award of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and with the 2008 Gemini Ink Literary Excellence Award.


Kellman is the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (W. W. Norton, 2005), which was honored with the 2005 New York Society Library Award for Biography and was praised in the San Francisco Chronicle as "not only a necessary addition to the annals of American literature, but also a trenchant exploration of the relationship between the horrors of life and the saving power of art." Kellman's other books include The Translingual Imagination (2000), The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (1993), Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (1985), and The Self Begetting Novel (1980). He is editor or co editor of M. E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (2009), Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (2003), UnderWords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld (2002), Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (2000), Leslie Fiedler and American Culture (1999), Into The Tunnel: Readings in Gass's Novel (1998), and Perspectives on Raging Bull (1994). Since 2001, he has co edited Magill's Literary Annual.

A contributing writer for The Texas Observer and the San Antonio Current, Kellman received the 1986 H. L. Mencken Award for his column in the San Antonio Light. He was awarded first place in arts criticism by the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies in 2006 and received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction for an essay in the Southwest Review during 2008. He is currently serving his third term as a director of the National Book Critics Circle and was recipient of the NBCC's 2007 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. His essays and reviews have appeared in The American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffingtonpost.com, Forward, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Times Book Review, Georgia Review, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among many other publications. Kellman was founding president of the literary center Gemini Ink and was elected into the Texas Institute of Letters.

This exhibit at the San Antonio Museum of Art is an excellent example of what art can do with foood as its subject.

Revised Final Conference Program

6th INTERDISCIPLINARY AND MULTICULTURAL CONFERENCE ON
FOOD REPRESENTATION IN LITERATURE, FILM AND THE OTHER ARTS
February 25-27, 2010
PROGRAM
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
College of Fine and Liberal Arts
The University of Texas at San Antonio
With the Support of the
Department of History
College of Fine and Liberal Arts
and
HEB

Thursday, February 25
5:00 pm-8:00 pm ::: Registration

6:30 pm. Aula Canaria :::

Marita Nummikoski, Chair, Dept. of Modern Languages & Literatures
Opening Remarks
Dean Dan Gelo, College of Liberal and Fine Arts
Welcome
Professor Christopher Wickham.
An Introduction to Talking about Food


7:00 pm. Aula Canaria :::

Steenson, Keeley -- The University of Texas at Austin
Two Short Films
Patrick Santé – Chef
Dinning as art - "The three stars"

8:00 pm. Reception (Cash Bar)

Friday, February 26th, 2010
I Session 8:30 am - 9:45 am

Panel 1. Food and Nation
Tebben, Maryann -- Bard College at Simon's Rock
The Concentrated Essence of Culture: Sauces as Metaphor in French Literature
Moran, Theresa -- Ohio University
Bayard Taylor, "The Great American Traveler," Afield with the Cup and the Pipe
Scholl, Jan -- Penn State University
Film Comedy Educated the Public about Food, 1911-1931

Panel 2. Film I
Matz, María R -- University of Massachusetts Lowell
El papel de la comida en la filmografía almodovariana
Chien-Cheng, Wu (James) -- Durham University of UK
Nostalgic Foodscape of Modern Taipei
Lirot, Julie -- Dartmouth College
Food as Cultural Identity in Exile

Panel 3. Food Pleasures I
Bobroff, Maria --
Gluttonous Pleasures: Arlequin, Sentimentality and Eighteenth-Century French Theater
Rich, Lauren G. -- University of Notre Dame
Conspicuous Consumption: Food & Dining in Eighteenth-Century Fantastic Literature


Friday, February 26th, 2010
II Session 10:00 am - 11:15 am

Panel 4. Film II
Israel, Deborah --
Whisk, Whisk! Chop, Chop!: The Kinesthetics of Cooking in Nor Ephron's Julie and Julia
Kumar, Nirmal -- Sri Vankateswara College
Food and Construction of motherhood in Hindi Films
Rundell, Richard -- New Mexico State University
Through His Stomach, North and South: Babette's Feast (1987), Like Water for Chocolate (1992), and Mostly Martha (2002)
Chalaire, Mary Anne -- University of Texas Pan American
The Americanization of Mostly Martha

Panel 5. Imagining Nations
Guy, Kolleen M. -- The University of Texas at San Antonio
History, the Culinary Turn, and Cultures of Abundance
Goldstein, Lauren --
Currying F(l)avour: Cultural Hybridization, India, and the British Empire
Timko, Merrianne -- Independent Researcher
Flaubert, Dumas, and Frith in the Land of the Pharaohs … In "The Land of Pilau"

Panel 6. Pedagogical Foods
Crosetto, Alice -- The University of Toledo
The Use of Food in Children's Literature: An Exploration
Oxford, Raquel -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Joaquín Sorolla: Food Representation in Celebrations and Work
González, Ana María – Texas Lutheran University
Naranja dulce, limón partido: el dulce, el chile y la manteca de la lírica tradicional latinoamericana

Friday, February 26th, 2010
III Session 11:30 am-12:45 pm

Panel 7. Comfort Food in Eco-Tourism
Cohen Miller, Anna --- Palo Alto College
Discussant: Discussion and Food Tasting of Indigenous South American Comfort Foods as Represented in Student Projects.

Panel 8. Literary Food
Bueno, Lourdes -- Austin College
Comida y comensales: “Delicias gastronómicas” en los clásicos españoles
Alpañés Pastor, María Amparo -- Washington and Jefferson College
Memoria, estatus e ingenio: el papel de la comida en Hoy caviar, mañana sardinas de Carmen y Gervasio Posadas
Agnew, Jennifer -- Harris-Stowe State University
Preparing 'Good Things to Eat': Creating Identity of Autonomy in Early African-American Food Writing

Panel 9. Fat Food
Garner, Kirsten E – UTSA
Nutritional Science
Candau, Antonio -- Case Western Reserve University
"No me come nada": A New -- Fat Free -- Spanish Author
Julier, Alice P -- Chatham University
Fat and Fighting Words: Obesity Discourses, Sustainability, and the Rhetoric of Resistance


Lunch Break


Friday, February 26th, 2010
IV Session 2:00 pm-3:15 pm

Panel 10. People’s Identity
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen --
Taking Back the Chicken Shack: African-American Challenges to White Food Stereotypes during the Civil Rights Era
Laemmerhirt, Iris-Aya -- University of Heilderberg and TU Dormund University
The Raw and the Cooked: National Identities, Othering and Resistance in Linda Furiya's Bento Box in the Hearland and Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meat
Caddell, Preston --
A study of Kimchi and its Cultural and Economical Effects in South Korean Society

Panel 11 Food Pleasures II
Gimbernat González, Ester -- University of Northern Colorado
Sazón inesperada en poemas en prosa de escritoras argentinas
Morris, Matt --
After the Party: Artistic Hindsight as Crowns Were Passed at the Fench Revolution and the Localvore Revolution
Van Zwoll, Lisa -- United Staes Air Force Academy
Madame at the Butter Churn: the Marquise de La Tour du Pin Cooks up Identity on the Farm

Panel 12. Literatura Cubana
Cornide, Ana -- Earlham College
Préstamos culturales y venenos: la nutrición del vacío en la cuentística de Virgilio Piñera
Vico Corvalán, Graciela N. -- Webster University
Cuerpo, carne, hambre, locura y autodestrucción en la obra de Virgilio Piñera
Torres Caballero, Benjamín -- Western Michigan University
La función de la comida en la literatura cubana contemporánea

Friday, February 26th, 2010
V Session 3:30 pm-4:45 pm

Panel 13. The Aesthetics and Politics of Scarcity
del Aguila, Rocío -- The University of Texas at Austin
The Real Eclectic Kitchen: Impoverished Indians and Wealthy Criollos Seated at the Same Table
Navarro, José Enrique -- The University of Texas at Austin
Hell's Kitchen: Images of Immigrant Labor in Parisian Restaurants in George Orwell and Santiago Gamboa
Tamayo, Cristine -- The University of Texas at Austin
The Liminal Kitchen: Textual Representations of Wartime Scarcity and the Male Provider in Civil War Spain

Panel 14. Food for the Soul
Chansky, Dorothy -- Texas Tech University
No Picnic: Food and Dystopia in the Plays of William Inge
McLeod, Stephen G. -- Jackson State University
Food for the Soul: The Power of Allusion in Chuck Sullivan's "Grace after Meals: Thanksgiving 1958"
O'Connor, Amber -- The University of Texas at Austin
Contemporary Religious Conversion in Quintana Roo: Changes in Religion, Communalism, Economy and Nutrition in a Maya Village

Panel 15. Pot-Pourri
Heise, Henriette --
Food and the Disgust of Existence: Sartre's narrative Nourritures
Duhaime, Douglas -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Mushrooms and the Margins of Agency: The Limitations of Cage's Chance Operations
Nieto, Nicole K. --
St Joseph's Day Altars: Collective Identity and Narrative in Post-Katrina New Orleans


Friday, February 26th, 2010


6:30 pm Aula Canaria

Steven G. Kellman
"The Only Fit Food for a Man is Half a Lemon":
Kafka's Plea and Other Culinary Aberrations



Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VI Session 8:30 am-9:45 am

Panel 16. Food and Leisure
Russek, Audrey -- The University of Texas at Austin
What's for Dinner?: The Absence of Food in American Restaurant Promotional Literature, 1920-1960
Janosik, Jeffrey -- Univeristy of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
More Cumin than Cumin: Imaginary Foodscapes and Representational Otherness in the US Mexican Restaurant
Warren, Dinah J. -- Dartmouth College
The Pursuit of Authenticity: The Impact of Tourism on Traditional Culinary Practices in Bahia

Panel 17. Mythologies
Aranda Silva, Alfredo -- University of Wisconsin La Crosse
Cosmogonía literaria del Café: De la semilla del cafeto a la mitología de los espacios enmarcados en sus correlatos artísticos
Namaste, Nina B --
Killing Him Softly: Identity Control in Myrna Santos Febres' 'Marina y su olor'
Morán, Elizabeth – Christopher Newport University
Feast for the Gods: Eating, Ritual, and Sacrifice in Aztec Art

Panel 18. The Labyrinth
Martínez-Ortiz, María Teresa -- Kansas State University
Violence, Hunger and the Politics of Social Control in Pan's Labyrinth: Analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Symbolic Imagery
Kordas, Ann -- Johnson & Wales Univeristy
Mother's Milk and Father's Bread: The Power of the Feminine in Pan's Labyrinth


Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VII Session 10:00 am-11:15 am

Panel 19. TV Shows
Goetzel, Johanna -- Wesleyan University
What is Not Said: The Food Network's Silenced Voices
McCullough, Cali --
Yum-O! From Julia Child to Rachel Ray: Defining the Success of the Celebrity Chef
Fong-Morgan, Bridget M-- Indiana University South Bend
We're Mixing Up a Murder: Television Cooking Shows and the Culinary Mystery

Panel 20. European Literature
Komara, Kirsten -- Schreiner University
Culture, Class, and Character: Representations of Food in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley
Kimball, Susanne --- UTSA
Cullinary Allusions, Decline and Spiritual Refinement in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks
Ware, Barbara Blithe --- Keene State College
The Creation of a National Culinary Canon: Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Gendered Authority

Panel 21. US Latino
Fernández, Ana -- Stony Brook University
Comida, memoria y creación de identidades en Caramelo de Sandra Cisneros y Monkey Hunting de Cristina García
Pignataro, Margarita E. -- Syracuse University
Bicultural Nutrition in Cuban-American Literature: Food Representation in Cuisine, Cosmetics and Religion
Knepp, M. Dustin -- University at Albany, State University of New York
The Role and Representation of Mexican Food in Life and Literature: an Ethnographic Comparison
Cárdenas, Norma – Oregon State University
Food, Place, Identity, and Memory in Woman Hollering Creek

Saturday, February 27th, 2010
VIII Session 11:30 am-12:45 pm

Panel 22. Hunger and Food
Rostankowski, Cynthia -- San Jose State University
The Other Mother's Roast Chicken: Authentic Food and Comfort in Neil Gaiman's Coraline
Heydl-Cortínez, Cecilia -- Penn State University
Hombres de maíz and Women Too: Corn is Food for the Soul from the Popol Vuh to Asturias and Chicana Writers
Moreno, María Paz -- University of Cincinnati
Eggless Omelets, Fried Sunflowers and Lots of Sardines: Cookbooks from the Spanish Civil War

Panel 23 Food in Language and Literature
Oxford, Jeffrey -- University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
Food and Food Gathering as Status Symbols in the Valencian Cycle and Beyond
Niño, Miguel A. -- Saint Edward's University
La comida: un elemento íntegro de la corrupción mexicana en Arráncame la vida
Stanford, Lois -- New Mexico State University
Como los frijoles del payaso…: Food Dichos in Mexico

Panel 24. Male and Food
McLean, Alice --
From Domestic Cookbooks to Gastronomic Literature: Gender and Genre in Nineteenth-Century Food Writing
Vester, Katharina -- American University
"Wolves in Chef's Clothing": Recipes for Masculinity in Hemingway, Hammett and Early Men's Cookbooks
Kolberg, Stephanie -- The University of Texas at Austin
Food in Porn: The Classing of Disgust and Desire in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler
Rao, Suweta -- University of Illinois Urbana Champain
The Men in Kitchen: Bawarchi and Cheeni Kum

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Buffet Lunch 1:00 pm


Stefani Bardin -- University of Buffalo
Food Issues, a Video Project. Continuous showing on Friday and Saturday

Food Sites

We have just added to our blog a new link to a site that offers a lot of information on food and a list of links to other sites: http://www.onthetable.us/