Search

This article examines descriptions of persons, objects or scenes in three novels, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Alice Thompson’s The Book Collector, which either straightforwardly or obliquely evoke various painting genres. I argue that although ekphrasis typically names nowadays “the verbal representation of visual representation” (James Heffernan), certain descriptions beg for a revision of the modern category of ekphrasis. My present corpus includes both ekphrases ‘proper’ and descriptions which evoke, without referring to, portraits, still lifes or genre paintings. I call the latter category readerly reverse ekphrasis, to emphasise the reader’s co-operation with the author – during the reading process – to determine, beyond the painterly affinities of the description, its structural makeup as ekphrasis.

This article studies comparatively references to tables in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse and two films, Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Greenaway announces from the title a concern with a cook, which the film duly elaborates by setting its action mostly in a restaurant and its kitchen; tables as the central part of the set visualise power configurations. In Wong’s film about failed love, the kitchen and/or tables as part of the décor reinforce mainstream notions of middle-class domesticity. Woolf challenges middle-class views of gender in two episodes from Part I – Mrs Ramsay’s dinner party and the dialogue between Lily Briscoe and Andrew Ramsay about the object of his father’s philosophy books – by defamiliarising respectively the dining-and kitchen tables. The latter scene, which repurposes the idea of the kitchen table as an analogon for philosophy’s construal of the nature of reality, opens up an epistemic avenue: thinking with the kitchen table. My general frame for analysis is Edmund Husserl’s concept of orientation, sustained by Bertrand Russell’s propositions about unobserved objects and unoccupied perspectives. However, I twist these conceptual tools intersectionally to unravel the social grounds of philosophical and artistic positions that obfuscate gendered contributions to knowledge, sustenance and general well-being.

This essay examines the perspectives on food, cooking and commensality offered by three highly dissimilar works: Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse (1927), Peter Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) and, as a cultural foil for the two British works, a Chinese film, Wong Kar- Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000). Food or eating is not the central topic of any of them, save Greenaway's film. Rather, their common denominator is the interplay of visuality and its implicit or explicit social reference, for all three works engage, however differently, with the class differential entailed in scenes featuring food or eating. I use Edmund Husserl's phenomenological concept of orientation -- amended in intersectional terms -- to examine the cook figures and instances of representing food or eating in the three works. My working hypothesis is that such representations may reveal both the permanent negotiation of cultural values attached to culinary practices, including to the agents involved, and what they conceal socially. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]