Delightful, delicious, disgusting

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 217-225

  Korsmeyer, Carolyn ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049273540     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1540-6245.00069     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. The alleged subjectivity of taste is examined at length in chapter 3 of my book Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, 1999)
2. Jean-Anselme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825), trans. M. F. K. Fisher (New York: Hermitage Press, 1949)
3. David Prall, Aesthetic Judgment (New York: Crowell, 1929)
4. Kevin Sweeney, "Alice's Discriminating Palate," Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999)
5. Elizabeth Telfer, Food for Thought (London: Routledge, 1996)
6. In Making Sense of Taste I elaborate these roles with the use of Nelson Goodman's symbol systems from Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976)
7. This list fits into the more comprehensive rosters of generally disgusting objects compiled by theorists such as William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard University Press, 1997)
8. and Aurel Kolnai, Disgust ("Der Ekel," Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 10 (1929))
9. T. Sarah Peterson, Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking (Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 96
10. Noël Carroll identifies fear and disgust as the two primary emotions of art horror in The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). Unlike some other theorists of horror, Carroll insists that appreciative disgust remains an aversion, which is the price the audience pays for the pleasure of discovery as the plot unfolds
11. Indifference is important because Burke rejects the idea that pleasure comes about only as the alleviation of a preexisting discomfort, or that pain is the removal of pleasure
12. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. James T. Boulton (University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 39. "Delight" is the term Burke uses to convey the positive magnetism of the sublime despite its pain; Kant calls this phenomenon "negative pleasure," and the oxymoron he chooses sums up the paradox of aversion
13. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, p. 40
14. Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room (Temple University Press, 1982). See also chap. 5 of Making Sense of Taste
15. Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Free Press, 1994), p. 13
16. Margaret Visser, The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners (New York: Penguin, 1991), pp. 3-4
17. Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), p. 347
18. Items in the second category, tastes that disgust because of surfeit, seem different from the others, all of which permit scope for the fourth conversion. Surfeit indicates an abuse of taste that requires scaling back rather than exploitation. However, as Scott Waltz pointed out to me, phenomena such as pepper or pie eating contests arguably exploit surfeit for its own pleasures
19. Alexandre Dumas, Dumas on Food: Selections from Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, trans. Alan and Jane Davidson (London: Folio Society, 1978), p. 152
20. Aurel Kolnai speculates that exaggeration of flavors that results in the "high taste" (haut goût) of gamy meat may be a model for the development of an "eroticism of disgust" both literal and aesthetic. See Disgust
21. See Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, chap. 3
22. Mark Meli drew this account to my attention. Richard Gordon Smith, Travels in the Land of the Gods: The Japan Diaries of Richard Gordon Smith, ed. Victoria Manthorpe (New York: Prentice Hall, 1986), p. 205. This part of the diary is from 1906/1907
23. Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (1970) (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 20
24. Michael Paterniti, "The Last Meal," Esquire 129, no. 5 (May 1998): 117
25. This paper has benefitted from the comments of several audiences and the careful readings of a number of colleagues. I would like to thank in particular Elizabeth Telfer, Ann Clark, Ann Colley, Rosemary Feal, Regina Grol, Claire Kahane, Barry Smith, and Carol Zemel