Table and Food Imaginary in the European Literature

Recommended Prerequisites

Not applicable.

Teaching Methods

Seminars imply interactive classes in which students are encouraged to actively participate in the pedagogical relationship, discussing texts and articles, under the instructor’s guidance. At the beginning of each syllabus unit, the instructor will lecture on theoretical and contextual aspects of the topics addressed.

Learning Outcomes

This seminar addresses in a critical manner the major lines and elements of the artistic, semantic and rhetorical dialogue of European literature – with a particular focus on Portuguese literature – with the thematic areas of food and the imaginary of food.

At the end of the seminar, the students should:

- Understand the intertextual relations between food and literature;

- Be familiar with a corpus of selected works of Western European literature that establish a dialogue with the thematic area of food and gastronomy;

- Recognize the specificity of literary language;

- Understand the historical evolution of the literary phenomenon in interconnection with the evolution of societies;

- Understand the aesthetic-cultural dimension of food and gastronomy.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Concepts

a. The breadth of the concept of Literature.

b. From language to the literary text.

c. Notions of literary genres and periods.

d. Literary developments in Western Europe (from the Middle Ages to the present).

e. Literary creation and its historic dialogue with food and the food imaginary.

2. Gastronomy and the Food Imaginary

a. Semantic-thematic definition and operational boundaries.

b. Repercussions in European literary creation.

c. Authors, works and the integration of food as an area of aesthetic and ethical exploration.

3. The imaginary of food in literature from medieval and Renaissance periods to the Baroque.

4. Food and its imaginary in nineteenth-century European literature: an exemplary process of thematization.

a. The case of realistic and naturalistic texts.

b. Public space and gastronomy: the novels of Eça de Queiroz.

5. Some aspects of 20th century literature in Europe:\

a. The neorealist literature and its dialectic with the food imaginary.

b. Postmodernism.

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Synthesis work: 10.0%
Other: 25.0%
Research work: 65.0%

Bibliography

BORRALHO, M. Luísa Malato (2008). História da Literatura Europeia. Uma introdução aos Estudos Literários. Lisboa: Quid Juris.

FERREIRA, V. (1998). Caldo de Estórias com Letras. Lisboa: INFT.

REIS, C. (Dir.) (1993-2010).  História Crítica da Literatura Portuguesa. 10 vols.. Lisboa: Editorial Verbo.

REIS, C. (1997).  O conhecimento da Literatura. Introdução aos Estudos Literários. 2.ª ed. Coimbra: Almedina.

SILVA, V. M. Aguiar e (1991). Teoria da Literatura. 8.ª ed. Coimbra: Almedina.