Feast and Folly

Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including The Aesthetics of Excess and Perverse Desire and the Ambiguous Icon, both published by SUNY Press, and (with Lawrence R. Schehr) French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture.

"The author's knowledge of cuisine, philosophy, and literature is truly overwhelming … The work is written for a specialized audience of readers familiar with the practices of postmodern analysis, readers expecting and appreciating the abstraction and fragmentation which characterize the approach. For this audience, Feast and Folly is a collection of fascinating and insightful essays on extreme examples of gastronomic writing." — French Review"Allen Weiss's Feast and Folly is exactly that: delicious, ravishing, and sublime! A remarkable, delightful, beautifully written, and brilliantly argued work." — David B. Allison, author of Reading the New Nietzsche"An exciting, fascinating book that engages various aspects of food studies, literature and the arts, and cultural studies in the best possible sense. What is unexpected is the way in which Weiss brings together these various fields of inquiry. His insights into French food are exciting and are new contributions to the field. A brilliant book." — Lawrence R. Schehr, coeditor of French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture"Outstanding. Weiss's prose is beautiful, and he demonstrates exquisite knowledge of the history of cuisine, especially French cuisine. He brings the understanding of recent French cuisine to a new dimension, stressing its postmodernity in its efforts at hybridization, its borrowing of other traditions and cultures, and its recycling of its own old traditions. The book also integrates, brilliantly, the presence of cuisine in the French literary productions from nineteenth-century authors to more recent ones." — Pierre Saint-Amand, author of The Laws of Hostility: Politics, Violence, and the Enlightenment

• Acknowledgments Preface: Transcendent or Transcendental?—Cuisine as Fine Art 1. Drunken Space 2. The Ideology of the Pot-au-feu 3. In the Devil's Kitchen 4. The Epic of the Cephalopod 5. Tractatus Logico-Gastronomicus PostfaceAn Introduction to Modern French Cuisine through Several Exemplary Menus Notes Select Bibliography About the Author Index