Adopting a multidisciplinary approach called gastro-criticism that draws
upon anthropology, sociology, semiotics, history, and literary studies,
Professor Ronald Tobin, Associate Vice Chancellor, UC Santa Barbara,
elucidates the role of food, service, spectacle, diet, ingestion, and
digestion in a number of works drawn from a variety of national
literatures. He concludes with specific reference to the
seventeenth-century French comic dramatist Molière and his
preoccupations with sexuality and power, pretense and pretentiousness,
trickery and truth, self and society.
