Semiotics of Food-and-Language
Guest editors: Jillian Cavanaugh and Kathleen Riley
"There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk." (M.F.K Fisher)
This issue looks at food as a signifying medium through which humans negotiate their material and spiritual existence. We complicate the well-established tradition of using language as a semiotic analog of food from Levi-Strauss and Douglas to beyond by presenting works that look at how food and language are semiotically interconnected in new ways. While such interconnections may appear to develop naturally out of the shared orality of food and language or their spatial-temporal contiguity, it is clear that these interpolations take various forms across diverse social and cultural contexts. Numerous studies suggest the fruitfulness of considering food and language as embedded within the same semiotic frame: research on language in use often incidentally includes data about the production, distribution, preparation, representation, and consumption of food, while many studies of food depend on linguistic data such as, for instance, words for food, utterances organizing its production, genres surrounding its preparation, and pragmatic routines for accessing and sharing it. However, the intrinsic simultaneities of food and language have rarely been explicitly theorized nor their interdependencies made into specific objects of analysis. The papers in this issue explore the semiotics of food from any new vantage point that considers food and language as mutually constitutive semiotic media, interrelated in sometimes coherent and sometimes contradictory ways. Like all thematic issues, Semiotics of Food-and-Language will remain open to new essays and interventions, and there is no deadline for submission. For the Call for Papers click here. To submit e-mail: semioticreview@gmail.com.
