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This book draws together the results of extensive research into the complex relationships that some modern European and Argentinean writers have enjoyed with food and wine. The European writers considered include Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo, Marcel Schwob, James Joyce and Robert Louis Stevenson; their Argentinean counterparts include Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J. Payró and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Through an exploration of both fiction and non-fiction, the author shows how these thinkers' ideas about food and wine influenced modernity and how they continue to influence contemporary issues such as 'globalized' menus and food poverty.
List of contents
Contents: Gourmet physiology or the bourgeois sorcery of shapes - Food for the body, fasting for the soul - Barthes: from the semiology of wine to the empire of the senses - Montaigne, the botrytis and Château d'Yquem - Kierkegaard, a philosophical Diet-et(h)ics and the truthful wine of Bordeaux - Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin: On the origin of the table and its stimulation of the excesses of the drunken barricades - Hemingway or the alcoholic outpours of Valpolicella - Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion wine - Svevo, the unconscious and the generous wine of Istria - Schwob, Stevenson and the imaginary history of the wines of Samos and Bourgogne - Sarmiento, the fermentation of the country and the preservation of wine - Aldao, servile monk and drinker - Mansilla or vernacular sybaritism - Payró the rogue: From the counterfeiter of Carlón wine to the Beaujolais of Villefranche - The shadow of Martínez Estrada and his alimentary radiography - Marie Langer, or the child as a Peronist snack.
About the author
Matías Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Quilmes in Argentina. He has published extensively in journals and magazines on the sociology of culture and food culture. He is the author of
Meditaciones sobre el gusto: vino, alimentación y cultura(2005),
La argentina fermentada: vino alimentación y cultura(2006) and
Comer(2010). He is also a founding member of the journal
Pensamiento de los confines.
