A Clark Faculty Series Event
Presented by
Elizabeth Blake, PhD
Assistant Professor of English
Clark University
Forbidden fruit has long been a convenient metaphor for illicit knowledge and sexuality, a trope easily traced to the garden of Eden. Modernist poets deployed this familiar figure in new ways, insisting on the fleshy materiality of fruit as a way of representing other forms of fleshly pleasure. In her recent book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, Clark University professor Elizabeth Blake examines this phenomenon as part of a larger exploration of the ways queer consumption restructures modernist literary forms. In this talk, Blake focuses on T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and H. D.’s “Priapus” to discuss the way modernist poets disrupt lyric traditions by setting intertextuality and phenomenological referentiality in tension in order to explore queer experience.
Admission is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Guests are encouraged to arrive at 11:45am for refreshments.
This event is sponsored by the Alice Coonley Higgins Institute for Arts and Humanities and the Department of English at Clark University.
About the Speaker
Professor Elizabeth Blake specializes in gender and sexuality studies, food studies, and global modernist literature. Her research focuses on the ways queer pleasure is represented in the literature of the early twentieth century, and how those representations come to reshape existing literary forms. Her first book, Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, demonstrates that scenes of eating in modernist literature are sites of queerness, depicting and enacting a kind of pleasure that exceeds normative models. She is also interested in the relationship between modernism and popular forms of cultural production, including cookbooks, dinner theatre, genre fiction, and women’s middlebrow fiction. Her second book project, tentatively entitled Against the Love Plot, traces the ways mid-twentieth century women’s fiction resists both normative models of love and normative plotlines that end in marriage.
About the Book
In Edible Arrangements: Modernism’s Queer Forms, Elizabeth Blake explores the way modernist writing about eating delves into larger questions about bodily and literary pleasure. Drawing on insights from the field of food studies, she makes dual interventions into queer theory and modernist studies: first, locating an embrace of queerness within modernist depictions of the pleasure of eating, and second, showing how this queer consumption shapes modernist notions of literary form, expanding and reshaping conventional genres. Drawing from a promiscuous archive that cuts across boundaries of geography and canonicity, Blake demonstrates how modernist authors draw on this consuming queerness to restructure a range of literary forms. Each chapter constellates a set of seemingly disparate writers working in related modes—such as the satirical writings of Richard Bruce Nugent, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Mansfield—in order to demonstrate how writing about eating can both unsettle the norms of bodily pleasure and those of genre itself.
