Mapping the Tasteland

Matías Bruera is a sociologist, researcher and teacher of the history of ideas at the University of Buenos Aires and the University of Quilmes in Argentina. He has published extensively in journals and magazines on the sociology of culture and food culture. He is the author of Meditaciones sobre el gusto: vino, alimentación y cultura (2005), La argentina fermentada: vino alimentación y cultura (2006) and Comer (2010). He is also a founding member of the journal Pensamiento de los confines.

Contents: Gourmet physiology or the bourgeois sorcery of shapes - Food for the body, fasting for the soul - Barthes: from the semiology of wine to the empire of the senses - Montaigne, the botrytis and Château d'Yquem - Kierkegaard, a philosophical Diet-et(h)ics and the truthful wine of Bordeaux - Brillat-Savarin, Baudelaire, Marx and Benjamin: On the origin of the table and its stimulation of the excesses of the drunken barricades - Hemingway or the alcoholic outpours of Valpolicella - Monogamous Joyce and his Fendant de Sion wine - Svevo, the unconscious and the generous wine of Istria - Schwob, Stevenson and the imaginary history of the wines of Samos and Bourgogne - Sarmiento, the fermentation of the country and the preservation of wine - Aldao, servile monk and drinker - Mansilla or vernacular sybaritism - Payró the rogue: From the counterfeiter of Carlón wine to the Beaujolais of Villefranche - The shadow of Martínez Estrada and his alimentary radiography - Marie Langer, or the child as a Peronist snack.