Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology and the Making of Modern Greece.

I can recall here my own frustrated efforts to educate young working-class girls by introducing them to literature that I thought would foster a kind of young version of class consciousness. Literature about girls like them — girls with decaying teeth, with fathers who sometimes drank too much with the pressure of being out of work — spoke more to my preconceived notions of “equity” and “empowerment” than the cultural and symbolic worlds of the girls themselves. It wasn’t until I learned to open my pedagogical imagination to the girls’ literary worlds, which for them hinged around popular fiction (notably horror films and related series paperbacks) that I stood even the smallest chance of creating an educational experience. — Deborah Hicks, “Labor Histories”

Place-Based Pedagogy for the Arts and Humanities

The community cookbook is a familiar item in many kitchens. Usually compiled by women and sold to raise funds for a charitable cause, these collections of recipes may seem to be utilitarian objects that exhibit little if any narrative interest. But this is hardly the case. In Recipes for Reading, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine community cookbooks as complex texts deserving serious study. The contributors contend that such cookbooks have stories to tell about the lives and values of the women who wrote them, stories that are autobiographical in most cases, historical in some, and fictive in others.

https://academic.oup.com/jah/article-pdf/85/3/1098/2076348/85-3-1098.pdf

Recipes for reading : community cookbooks, stories, histories

\" . . . provides valuable information for the specialist in American studies, and for the anthropologist or folklorist focusing on food use, and may also be of interest to the general reading audience. With such a wide appeal, the book may not only document the American romance with ethnic foods, but may contribute to it as well.\" Joanne Wagner, Anthropological Quarterly How do customs surrounding the preparation and consumption of food define minorities within a population? The question receives fascinating and multifaceted answers in this book, which considers a smorgasbord of dishes that sustain group identity and often help to bridge inter-group barriers.The essays explore the symbolic meaning of shared foodways in interpreting inter- and intra-group behavior, with attention to theoretical problems and the implications of foodways research for public policy. Topics receiving rewarding analysis in this volume include food festivals, modes of food preparation, meal cycles, seasonal celebrations, nutrition education, and the government's inattention to ethnic customs in forumlating its food policies. \

Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity

This thesis examines how paramythi, as a literary trope, circulates in different ways in the texts of five Greek Australian writers and what this reveals about diasporic subjectivities.

/pdf/transforming-paramythi-in-diasporic-literature-five-greek-wukj43yulq.pdf

Transforming Paramythi in diasporic literature : five Greek Australian writers

In the wake of international publicity about the Cretan/Mediterranean
diet, I survey, contextualize, and critique cookbooks about Cretan/Greek
food. In order to address such issues as human health, nature/ecology,
and "eating local," I examine how cookbooks negotiate regional and
national identities in the context of transnational discourses like
medical science and ecology. Specifically, I argue that Cretan cookbook
authors draw on the Greek nationalist ideologies of folkloric cultural
continuity and aestheticism, as well as the discourse of science, in order
to negotiate Cretan food in ways that resist modern sensibilities. An
examination of their intersections with American cookbooks makes even
clearer the contested nature of such discourses, and indicates that a
degree of Crete's local agricultural and foodways autonomy might be at
stake in these texts.

Greek Food After Mousaka : Cookbooks, "Local" Culture, and the Cretan Diet

The study of literature and environment ("ecocriticism") has done little to relate its interest in questions of place sense and place awareness to literary criticism's perennial concern with cultural identities. Pandelis Prevelakis's fictional trilogy, Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας advances a "literary theory" for doing just this. Prevelakis illustrates the inescapable and contradictory interrelatedness of place awareness and national identities in literary culture. He suggests that the unresolvable quality of their interrelatedness should inspire authors to engage in personal struggles resulting in literary output that negotiates ethical positions with their local fellow citizens in ways that take local traditions seriously, without entirely embracing them. Thus, he problematizes conventional notions of ithografia by foregrounding ethos not only as custom but in an ethical and rhetorical sense as well. This perspective can help literary critics explore and analyze the relationship between atomistic notions of place awareness and culturally mediated identities.

https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_greek_studies/v023/23.1ball.pdf

Eric L. Ball

Papers

Greek Food After Mousaka : Cookbooks, "Local" Culture, and the Cretan Diet

Toward a Greek Ecocriticism: Place Awareness and Cultural Identity in Pandelis Prevelakis's Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας