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Eating, Drinking and Re-Thinking: Marguerite Duras's Moderato cantabile (1958)

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fmls/cqt003

1471-6860

Ruth Cruickshank,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Re-thinking food, drink and appetite offers new ways of exploring subjectivity, self–Other relations and textual production. Like language, food and drink are human necessities which always carry surcharges of meaning. Moreover, there is an untapped convergence of theoretical approaches related to appetite. This article draws on a range: structuralist (Barthes and Lévi-Strauss); post-Marxist (Bourdieu); feminist (Beauvoir and Cixous); post-Freudian (Lacan); poststructuralist (Derrida), and socio-anthropological (Fischler). It explores their potential by analysing representations of food and drink in Duras's Moderato cantabile. Stimulating critical appetites anew, surprising leftovers of realism are identified, and new readings of the novel reveal class and gender constructs. The discussion then examines how the appetitive is intertwined with tensions bound up in desire, lack and repressed trauma as well as the incorporation of food and drink, in turn elucidating the anxieties and ambivalence inherent in the constitution of the self, power relations and representational practice.