UCLA

In a study ranging from Futurist cookbooks to fast-food lyrics, this dissertation opens up new perspectives on modernist writing in relation to key developments in American food culture. It resituates popular culinary texts within a discourse of literary aesthetics and rereads literary texts as they reflect the conditions of alimentary production and consumption. Pairing chefs and poets -- Julia Child & Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon & Frank O'Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor & Harryette Mullen -- I show how a modernist fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of a nation undergoing tremendous shifts: from an austere wartime sensibility of patriotic eating, to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism, and finally, to racially inflected supermarket pastorals in the second half of the century. My research engages an interdisciplinary cross-section of literary and visual forms, drawing on culinary history, art theory, cultural anthropology, race and gender studies, eco-criticism, and food studies, while remaining invested in literary analysis, to illuminate the correlating aesthetic economies of foodstuff and language, and to rethink the collision of popular culture and high art. I consider how modernism positions food as an innovative site for the ingestion and reflux of ideas, reconceptualizations of art, reflections on embodied humanity, and broader queries of taste. I argue that just as cooking makes an aesthetics of everyday food by lifting it from routine to art, literature reflexively uses food to address its own necessariness; sustenance for the physical and imaginary palates of Americans during moments of significant change.