Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime

Allen S. Weiss

feb 2012 · State University of New York Press

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What would it mean to speak of cuisine as a "fine art"? Combining an analysis of French cuisine with cutting-edge postmodernist critique, Feast and Folly provides a fascinating history of French gastronomy and cuisine over the past two centuries, as well as considerable detail regarding the preparation of some of the colossal meals described in the book. It offers a deep analysis of the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of cuisine and taste, exploring the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetics and rhetorical forms of the modern culinary imagination. Allen S. Weiss analyzes the structural preconditions of considering cuisine as a fine art, connects the diverse discursive conditions that give meaning to the notion of cuisine as artwork, and investigates the most extreme psychological and metaphysical condition of the aesthetic domain—the sublime—in relation to gastronomy.

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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.