Death and the dinner party
Hospitality and hungry history in Joyce and Bowen
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3774288 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Scott Brewster (0000-0001-7948-0462, University of Staffordshire) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 3 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 59-68 |
| Publication date | 1998-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Angelaki (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0969-725X • E-ISSN: 1469-2899 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09697259808571999 |
| OpenAlex | W2082800489 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
This article deploys Freud's work on totemic practice, mourning and the uncanny to analyse complex fictions of remembering and forgetting, invitation and exclusion played out around dinner tables in Joyce's Dead, and Bowen's The Last September and A World of Love. As Freud hypothesizes, and these literary texts appear to confirm, acts of communal eating, devoted directly or indirectly to commemorating absent figures, uncannily bring up history. None of these texts chronicle the devastating effects of the famine historically; indeed, there are no explicit references to those events. Yet dinner scenes in the work of these writers might be seen as staged in the famine's wake, textual moments in which the outside of history registers as an ineradicable residue or trace. If these texts are read in the aftermath of famine, then to celebrate plenty and collective identity in the form of a dinner party can function as a festive or ritual gesture of forgetting, whilst never fully effacing the unnerving resonances and survival of that historical moment. Thus a figurative pattern of consumption, memory and loss weaves through the proprieties of the dinner party. The discussion will elaborate a process of commemoration that simultaneously erases and sustains historical memory, excluding and including the dead
Advertising · Archaeology · Art · Business · Hospitality · Irish and British Studies · Modernist Literature and Criticism · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · History
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |