Taste: Food, Life, and Literature [Online]
Full Tuition: $320 — Scholarship options are available in the drop-down enrollment menu for you to self-select.
Instructor: Hollis | 5 Weeks | Mondays | February 5 - March 4 | 7:00 - 9:00 PM ET | ONLINE
Literature is steeped in food. For T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, it can break him from his daily drudgery: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” For writers as different as Marcel Proust and Ralph Ellison, and food as different as madeleines and yams, it floods them with memories of childhood. It can even be funny, like when Allen Ginsberg imagines Walt Whitman in a grocery store demanding to know “who killed the pork chops?” Or recipes themselves can serve as poetry, as they did for Emily Dickinson. Whether it is a metaphorical plum or a literal gorgonzola sandwich, a cookbook or a gustatory novel, food matters as much in the stories we read as it does in the lives we lead.
In this class, we will look at food and its presence in our lives and our literature through different perspectives, including sex, comfort, sustainability, survival, memory, and community. We will think about how food can nurture and delight us but we will also think about how food has the potential to harm us. We will read everything from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” in which he proposes a unique solution to the Great Famine in Ireland to excerpts from Francesca Ekwuyasi’s new novel Butter Honey Pig Bread.
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Recordings may be provided upon request for missed classes.
Sliding Scale: Night School Bar pays instructors and staff a living wage, and your tuition goes toward supporting this practice. Please pick the payment tier that corresponds to your needs, and consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. We will never request or require proof of need, and do not use an income-based sliding scale; we trust you to decide what payment tier is right for you. If you would like additional support deciding or would like to learn more about the practice of using a sliding scale, we recommend this resource from Embracing Equity.
Scholarships: We are currently able to offer three full scholarships per class. Our full scholarship tier is a nonrefundable offering, limited to one per student per month. Because our scholarship funding is limited, selecting multiple full scholarships in a single month will result in disenrollment from all classes. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out please email us directly, and we will add you to a waitlist and notify you if additional scholarships become available. Please see our FAQ for more information, including installment plans and refund policy.
Asynchronous Auditing: Classes are discussion-based and designed to be taken synchronously. However, we do offer an asynchronous audit option for most online classes if you need to follow along at your own pace. You must choose the audit option to receive all course recordings; please do not register using a scholarship if you do not plan to attend the majority of class sessions as you will not receive the recording materials to follow along. We do not automatically offer scholarships for auditors, but if you need one, you may request one by filling out this form.