The essays in this book examine the importance of food as a pivotal element - both materially and conceptually - in the history of the Western avant-garde.

Introduction

1 Tasting Is Believing: A Few Thoughts on Still Life Poetics

2 On Tender Buttons and Brussels Sprouts: Modernism and the Aesthetics of Consumption

3 Pop Serialism: Soup Cans, Pie Counters and Things that Look like Meat

4 Minimalists and Anorexics

5 Uncontrollable Materialities: Food and the Body in Performance

Epilogue: The Food and Hunger Poet at the Turn of the Century; Anorexia, Anthropoemia and Abjection

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Michel Delville teaches English and American literatures, as well as comparative literature, at the University of Liège, Belgium, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author of several books including J.G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (2001; with Pierre Michel), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (2005; with Andrew Norris), and The American Prose Poem, which won the 1998 SAMLA Studies Book Award. He recently co-edited three volumes of essays on postwar poetry (The Mechanics of the Mirage, 2000; Sound as Sense: US Poetry &/In Music, 2004; Poésie, Musique, Modernité, 2004).