Nie smakuj zła. Groza jamy ustnej w starożytnym Rzymie

• Authors: Alice Weinreb

Title variants

EN

Taste no Evil: The Dangers of the Mouth in Ancient Rome

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

Alice Weinreb Taste no Evil: The Dangers of the Mouth in Ancient Rome   Summary The essay grapples with the erotic overtones of culinary literature of Ancient Rome. By compiling a wide range of sources, including poetry, drama, and historical writings, the author attempts to reconstruct the metaphoric and symbolic values of the Roman food-world. Locating this world around the problematic construction of an elite Roman masculinity, she argues that the mouth became both literal and metaphoric center of manliness, and ultimately thus Roman-ness. Because of its liminal position on the body and its vague gender identity and attri­butes, the construction of the os impurum, the mouth polluted by contact with the world of sexuality and food, haunts much of the Roman writing. Embodying a dangerous bridge between sexual pleasure and gustatory pleasure, the mouth, envisioned as cause and effect of oral sex and oral consumption, was posited as a profound threat and a main site of vulnerability for the masculine body. Descriptions of feasts, criticisms of table manners, recipes, and erotic verse, all are woven together to locate the mouth at the heart of the literary Roman self, and present to the modem reader a startlingly graphic and disturbing vision of the erotic and grotesque body.

EN

Alice Weinreb Taste no Evil: The Dangers of the Mouth in Ancient Rome   Summary The essay grapples with the erotic overtones of culinary literature of Ancient Rome. By compiling a wide range of sources, including poetry, drama, and historical writings, the author attempts to reconstruct the metaphoric and symbolic values of the Roman food-world. Locating this world around the problematic construction of an elite Roman masculinity, she argues that the mouth became both literal and metaphoric center of manliness, and ultimately thus Roman-ness. Because of its liminal position on the body and its vague gender identity and attri­butes, the construction of the os impurum, the mouth polluted by contact with the world of sexuality and food, haunts much of the Roman writing. Embodying a dangerous bridge between sexual pleasure and gustatory pleasure, the mouth, envisioned as cause and effect of oral sex and oral consumption, was posited as a profound threat and a main site of vulnerability for the masculine body. Descriptions of feasts, criticisms of table manners, recipes, and erotic verse, all are woven together to locate the mouth at the heart of the literary Roman self, and present to the modem reader a startlingly graphic and disturbing vision of the erotic and grotesque body.

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach / Śląsk Sp. z o.o. Wydawnictwo Naukowe
• Journal: ER(R)GO: Teoria – Literatura – Kultura
• Year: 2002
• Issue: 4

Dates

published

2002-01-01

Contributors

author

Alice Weinreb