Taste: Food, Life, and Literature [6-weeks, $250 Suggested]
Instructor: Hollis | Mondays 7:00-9:00 PM ET | November 7-December 12
Literature is steeped in food. For T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, it can break him from his daily drudgery: “Do I dare 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?” Whether it is a metaphorical plum or a literal gorgonzola sandwich, 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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For each class, four (4) full tuition scholarships and five (5) 80% tuition scholarships are available. Due to limited scholarship funds, we are currently only able to offer one class per term at the full scholarship level to any individual student—if you need a full scholarship, please sign up for the class you most want to take and email us to waitlist for any additional classes. We will add you when funds become available. Direct student donations are a crucial aspect of our funding model, and without them, we are not able to pay instructors a living wage. We encourage you to pick the payment tier that corresponds with your needs, but ask that you please consider our commitment to fair labor practices when doing so. If the scholarship tier you need is sold out or you would like to pay tuition on an installment basis, please email us directly, and we will work with you.
If at any point up to 48 hours before your first class session you realize you will be unable to take the class, please email us and we will reallocate your funds to a future class, to another student’s scholarship, or refund it. After classes begin, we are only able to make partial refunds and adjustments.
Photo credit: Jannicke Wiik-Nielsen/Science Photo Library