Food, literature transform cultures in UW-Madison research

In Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, “The Secret Agent,” a detective working undercover in London’s Soho district visits an Italian restaurant that makes Italian food like nothing you would find anywhere in Italy.

“This may seem like an insult, and for Conrad it probably was. But in truth, it’s one of the exciting things about Italian restaurants. They incorporate local ingredients and techniques and tastes to create something new and hybrid, neither Italian nor English. Maybe something like English-Italian,” says Rebecca Walkowitz, associate professor of English.

Indeed, Walkowitz says that you can draw countless parallels between the importance of both food and literature as instigators and vehicles of cultural and social evolution. And so she will at a public discussion at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, April 25, at the downtown public library.

“Like literature, food is one of the ways that we preserve cultural traditions and also one of the ways that we transform them,” she says.

Walkowitz is fresh off completing a new book on the ways in which literature, food and other aspects of social engagement go about effecting these changes.

“Like literary culture, food culture always has involved the mixing of ingredients and the adjustment of recipes and tastes prompted by experimentation and encounters with other traditions,” Walkowitz says. “Experimentation in food, like experimentation in literature, can serve as a way to negotiate multiple cultural traditions. Think of fusion cuisine or European technique done with regional ingredients, which often produces new forms of local culture: Wisconsin Camembert.”

The book, “Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation” (Columbia University Press, 2006), just arrived in bookstores. In it, Walkowitz dissects the work of James Joyce, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989’s “The Remains of the Day”), Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushie, W.G. Sebald (“The Ring of Saturn” from 1995) and others as avenues of cultural transformation.

She says that food also piqued every one of her subjects’ interests.

“All these writers are interested in how food travels and in the social occasions that food creates,” Walkowitz says. “Readers of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ remember the pork kidney that Leopold Bloom eats for breakfast. And Salman Rushdie often uses foods like chutney and jambalaya as metaphors for the stewing and mixing that characterize any local culture.”

Walkowitz will continue this line of inquiry in her next book. “I plan to continue thinking about how books and other cultural products circulate in the world, and how the makers of those products begin to adapt their creativity to the new conditions of globalization,” she says.

“This will include more expansive and immediate transport to many places and in many forms and languages.”

Yes, Walkowitz describes herself as an avowed foodie. Her own list of favorite dishes is as eclectic as the ones mentioned in the books she studies.

“I’m an adequate cook but a very good eater,” she says. “I really enjoy a hamburger but also sea urchin and veal cheeks.”

Next fall she will teach a large lecture course on violence and creativity in the contemporary British novel. The reading list for the course will include short stories by Joyce, Rushdie, E.M. Forster, Pat Barker and other writers who use food as a way of registering both local and transnational culture.

Her upcoming lecture will discuss cultural evolutions in terms of fused and regional cuisine with a panel of chefs including Rajan Pradhan of Chautara and Patrick O’Halloran of Lombardino’s and The Old Fashioned.

“I wanted to include restaurants and chefs involved in what I call ‘rooted cosmopolitan’ cooking here in Madison. This involves a range of strategies, from fusion cooking, to mixing techniques from one place with ingredients from another, to adapting recipes collected in, say, Italy to the variation of tastes here in Madison,” she says. “I’m really excited by the range of examples we have in this city!”

The event is presented by the UW–Madison Center for the Humanities. It is free and all are welcome.