Dedication to Hunger

The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture

Bibliographic Data

ID19935599
AuthorsLeslie Heywood (corresponding author)
Year1996
Publication date1996-12-31
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueDedication to Hunger (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1525/9780520310322
OpenAlexW4249727267
Open LibraryOL51610962M
ISBN9780520310322
LanguageEN
Citations received28

Writing as a competitive athlete, an academic, and a woman, Leslie Heywood merges personal history and scholarship to expose the "anorexic logic" that underlies Western high culture. She maneuvers deftly across the terrain of modern literature, illustrating how this logic--the privileging of mind over body, of hard over soft, of masculine over feminine--is at the heart of the modernist style. Her argument ranges from Plato to women's bodybuilding, from Franz Kafka to Nike ads. In penetrating examinations of Kafka, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Conrad, Heywood demonstrates how the anorexic aesthetic is embodied in high modernism. In a compelling chapter on Jean Rhys, Heywood portrays an author who struggles to develop a clean, spare, "anorexic" style in the midst of a shatteringly messy emotional life. As Heywood points out, students are trained in the aesthetic of high modernism, and academics are pressured into its straitjacket. The resulting complications are reflected in structures as diverse as gender identity formation, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. Direct, engaging, and intensely informed by the author's personal involvement with her subject, Dedication to Hunger offers a powerful challenge to cultural assumptions about language, gender, subjectivity, and identity

Psychology · Religion, Ecology, and Ethics · Anorexia nervosa · Anorexia nervosa in literature · Culture · History and criticism · Literature, Modern · Literature, modern, history and criticism · Medicine in literature · Modern Literature · Women · Women in literature