Recipes, whether in cookbooks or in other texts, exemplify embedded and gendered discourse. In the 1951 edition of Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, Marion Becker's editorial altering of the proportions between “bed”—the narrative that frames the recipes—and recipe erodes the bed and erodes as well the usefulness of the recipes. More cognizant than Becker's text of the importance of this bed, E. F. Benson's comic novel Mapp and Lucia both embeds the recipe for those masculine—whether male or female—readers unaware of the recipe's social significance and establishes a connection between recipe with-holding and narrative. Nora Ephron's Heartburn uses the recipe and its social meanings to play with notions of reproducibility both literary and culinary and thereby elaborates a connection, implied in the early versions of Joy, between recipe sharing and narrative production and consumption, a connection that “Recipes for Reading” itself attempts to reproduce.

Joyce's early and middle fictions often examine the pivotal role the gaze of the other plays within human consciousness. The self's enthrallment to the other's eye is dramatized even more vividly in Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake, where the dreaming subject conceives of himself pervasively as object, scrutinized by a gaze alternately critical and flattering. The power of the gaze to decenter and destabilize the self expresses itself formally in the Wake's odd, controversial narrative structure: the dream text unravels largely from the vantage point of the internalized gaze, its innovative form constituting an attempt to represent the other within the self—a presence often elided by the waking mind. Joyce's final oeuvre inscribes the dream return of a psychic obsession that surfaces initially in his earlier explorations of the self-conscious subject. This essay treats Finnegans Wake as an uncanny text, strange and yet familiar.

In Mimologiques: Voyage en Cratylie ‘Mimologics: A Voyage into Cratylusland,’ Gérard Genette introduces his readers to a new genre of discourse that cuts across disciplinary boundaries: mimologism. Beginning with the “founding text” in Plato's Cratylus, Genette explores the twists and turns of the debate between mimeticists and conventionalists over the origin and nature of language. The terms mimologism and Cratylism describe the position of Cratylus and all those in his wake—aestheticians, poets, and philosophers of language—who believe, “rightly or wrongly,” that “there must be a relation of reflective analogy (a relation of imitation) between ‘word’ and ‘thing,‘ that motivates, or justifies, the existence and the choice of the former.” At the same time, the “Cratylian desire” for perfect harmony between word and thing expresses itself unconsciously in “reveries,” or mimologics, in which the dreamer—whether Schlegel, Renan, Proust, or Saussure—muses on the mimetic potential of language (Genette 9).