Gastrocriticism – A New Approach to Reading (Irish) Literature

Description

This paper showcases a new beginning in literary theory and criticism, as it employs a new form of literary criticism to selected Irish writings, offering new insights.
Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism focused on human relationships with each other and to the natural world through food. It is informed by the concepts and insights of gastronomical scholarship and Food Studies and pays particular attention to the role food and foodways play in literary writing. Gastrocriticism investigates not only the symbolic and rhetorical use of food and foodways in literary texts, but also the meaning and context – social, historical, political or other – of their material or embodied appearance, thus becoming a useful tool for the study of foodways and culinary traditions. Fields such as food history, sociology, folklore and Irish studies offer a complex understanding of food and foodways, and the gastrocritical approach explores how these meanings are refracted in literary writing.
The texts I will investigate explore new beginnings themselves. In George Moore’s “Homesickness” (1903), an emigrant on a return visit from America must decide between a farmer’s life in Ireland and his new one as a bartender in the New World. Much later, Colm Tóibín puts his protagonist in Brooklyn (2009) before a similar dilemma, as she finds love on a home visit to Ireland. In both stories, foodways provide not only colour, but also feed into the central conflict of the old versus the new. A gastrocritical reading of the two texts will reveal how the old and the new are experienced through food and foodways in Irish literature.

Period	29 Oct 2021
Event title	Conference of the Association of Franco-Irish Studies: New Beginnings
Event type	Conference
Location	Dublin, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International