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Chapter 1 - Bad Taste

Satire and the Senses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2023

Elizabeth Blake
Affiliation:
Clark University
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Summary

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.

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Chapter
Information
Edible Arrangements
Modernism's Queer Forms
, pp. 22 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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  • Bad Taste
  • Elizabeth Blake, Clark University
  • Book: Edible Arrangements
  • Online publication: 26 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321242.002
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  • Bad Taste
  • Elizabeth Blake, Clark University
  • Book: Edible Arrangements
  • Online publication: 26 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321242.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Bad Taste
  • Elizabeth Blake, Clark University
  • Book: Edible Arrangements
  • Online publication: 26 September 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009321242.002
Available formats
×