News Archive

The role of food in Israeli literature will be the focus a free public lecture by Professor Nancy Berg at The University of Western Australia on Thursday, July 5, 2007.

An outstanding scholar of Hebrew and Comparative Literature from Washington University, St Louis, Missouri, Professor is the author of Exile from Exile: Israeli Writers from Iraq, will present a lecture entitled The Israeli Gastro-narrative: Food in Hebrew Fiction.

“In world literature (as in film), food is often used as a metaphor to explore class, gender and sex,” Professor Berg said.

“Lavish feasts and luxury food items identify the wealthy; women cook for their menfolk; and eating with a voracious appetite can serve as a form of erotic foreplay. While some of this is in play in Israeli literature, there is also a uniquely Israeli flavour to the ways in which food is used and the ways in which food is significant.”

In this talk, Professor Berg is most interested in more recent literature, sometimes identified as post-Zionist, in which food becomes a personal issue. The literature writes against the earlier gastro-narratives, switching gender roles and de-eroticising the sexual in the sensual.

The lecture starts at 6pm in the Social Sciences Lecture Theatre at UWA.

All are welcome and no bookings are required. For more information call 6488 1340 or email: [email protected]

Media references

Milka Bukilic 61 8 6488 1340
(IAS)

Simone Hewett / Francesca Robb 61 8 6488 7977
(UWA Public Affairs) 0420 790 097 / 0420 790 098