Abstract:
My purpose in this thesis is deliberately to trouble interarts scholarship by examining what has tended to be relatively subliminal: namely the cannibalistic nature of image/text relationships. Specifically, this thesis will explore how the theme of cannibalism/eating inserts itself into interarts theory and practice and how it functions as a metaphor for relationships between the arts. While the depiction of food and drink has long been and remains a "collective obsession" for artists, and while this century has seen a significant number of studies concerned with the way food is depicted in a single medium (i.e., paintings of food, or poems about food), my study differs from those of the past in several ways: (1) my concern is less with food per se and more with eating and in turn with the way that the eater/eaten relationship is analogous to the way that the various arts are ranked; (2) the texts I will be examining have a multimedia character, and my focus is on how both the verbal and the visual media are enlisted to deal with the eating issue; and (3) I place both interarts collaboration and interarts rivalry in the context of the eater/eaten relationship. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
