Reading Three

Daniel Miller, "Making Love in Supermarkets" (1998)  

 

FRIDAY 5 FEBRUARY, 1:00-3:00PM: 

For our third Sadler Seminar we consider Daniel Miller's classic anthropological analysis A Theory of Shopping (1998). We will focus on the pivotal chapter "Making Love in Supermarkets," as provided in the pdf here. Some contributors to our discussion may have been following Miller's work since the publication of this study; others, like myself, will be coming to it relatively late in the day. No doubt our group will be similarly divided between those who find Miller's study persuasive and even affirming and those who remain sceptical. Ewan Morrison, our public speaker this May, provides an interesting point of comparison; see his interview here  

 

Reading Two

Frank Cochoy and Catherine Grandclément-Chaffy, "Publicizing Goldilocks' Choice at the Supermarket. The Political Work of Shopping Packs, Carts and Talk" (2005)  

 

FRIDAY 4 DECEMBER, 2:00-4:00PM: 

Supermarkets, Nutrition and Responsibility

 

Many US literary works also suggest that supermarkets abstract and alleviate: that even as they try to help us move our foods and ourselves without hindrance through the store, they sell foods through an abstract more than sensual iconography (cheer, sunshine, wholesomeness, purity). Elsewhere this canon reveals that Ginsberg was not alone in feeling that his supermarket was enjoining him to go, as he famously put it, “shopping for images.” Reverberating throughout the canon, these whispered suggestions—these intimations that in supermarkets we are buying something other than food—provide fascinating portents of recent Leeds research into the role of the supermarket system in contemporary food crises. The White Rose universities are now home to much exciting new work in this area: the Leeds psychobiologist Graham Finlayson is pioneering research into appetite control and the individual experience of food reward; the Sheffield psychologist Yael Benn is illuminating the complex factors at play in the choices supermarket customers make when shopping online; and the geographer David Bell investigates the shifting levels of responsibility (commercial, governmental, individual) in a variety of campaigning TV food programme. The purpose of this second seminar is thus to create a simple interdisciplinary encounter: between these sociocultural and scientific explorations and a literary canon already disturbed by the supermarket’s complicity in American overeating and obesity. How might new psychological research into the “incentive salience” of food and different orders of wanting recast the portrayals of convenience and excess offered by those US writers who witnessed the supermarket’s rise firsthand? How might these writers, with their empathetic identifications and their understanding of the religious vocabularies of US everyday life, enrich these psychological theories?

 

 

 

Reading One

Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise (2012)

 

FRIDAY 6 NOVEMBER, 1:00-3:00PM: 

Supermarkets and the American 1950s

 

US literature and US photography’s first responses to the rise of the supermarket often present it as a realm in which foods seem a little more visual and a little less substantial, and people, and “housewives” in particular, glide past each other without quite connecting. Yet this emphasis on a soft and disembodied supermarket occurred in a 1950s society in which shop counters and other more traditional emporia had become a theatre for the ugly confrontations of segregation and the Civil Rights struggle. How might we relate these phenomena together? Did the new design and paraphernalia of the American supermarket prioritise a visual consumption of food over other senses, and was this associated with the postwar project of restoring normative bourgeois femininity? How might we relate these decisive shifts to the contemporary culture’s failing protocols of bodily intimacy and racial mixture? In our opening seminar we bring together US literature scholars with experts on the Civil Rights struggle and the advent of American postmodernity. Through our interdisciplinary conversations we will begin to place the supermarket back into its original context, reconnecting its key technological features, now ubiquitous worldwide, to the peculiar social forces in its historic site of origin.

 

Participants: Simon Hall (History), Sharon Monteith (American Studies, The University of Nottingham), Brendon Nicholls (English), Andrew Warnes (English) and all other interested participants.

 

 

 

 

FRIDAY 19 MAY, 4:00PM--7:30PM:

After the Flow: Ewan Morrison and the Post-Mall World