In “Tasteful Insights: Food, Desire and the Visual in Hemingway’s Literary

Still Lifes,” Randall Wilhelm explores the intersection of modernist

sensory experience, visuality, and psychoanalysis in Ernest Hemingway’s
work by analyzing the use of still life structures. Drawing upon his own
background in art history, Wilhelm provides insightful formal analysis
of the paintings of Paul Cézanne, in whose works Hemingway famously
reports discovering a “secret” about writing that he never tells. Wilhelm
suggests that Cézanne’s talent for transforming food objects into “vibrating
masses of unstable colors” provides Hemingway with a model for writing
“moveable feasts,” or “still life structures that are never still,” which he
analyzes in examples from both fiction and memoir. In the latter, which
Wilhelm discusses in tandem with Méret Oppenheim’s famous fur saucer,
Hemingway’s surrealist elements indicate subverted desires. As the practice
of still life “hinges on the temporal conditions of mortal existence”
and “performs dually as a memento mori and a carpe diem,” Wilhelm argues
that Hemingway’s literary still lifes enable his masculine roles to pivot
between fear of inadequacy and the replenishing power of sexual taboo.
In “Modernist Taste: Ford Madox Ford, Queer Potatoes, and Goodly
Apples,” Bradford Taylor reads a range of Ford’s work, including No Enemy,
The Good Soldier, “On Impressionism,” and several poems, to produce a
queer reading of taste. Ford was a prolific gardener, a practice that, for Taylor,
prompts Ford to refute Kant’s insistence on “divorc[ing] the capacity
for aesthetic pleasure from the realm of necessity.” A peasant working the
field, Ford argues, “is able to engage the world aesthetically—freely—not
despite, but because his mind is occupied by the repetitive task of digging
potatoes,” allowing an escape from the social training that has “predetermined”
educated minds. Ford’s potatoes, then, queer taste by upending its
conventional structure. In addition to revising Kantian notions of taste,
Taylor argues that the desire for this sort of direct access to materiality
itself is the impulse that drives Impressionism, for “the brute, everyday,
‘non-Impressionistic’ reality . . . both catalyzes the Impressionistic act,
and marks out the limit of its scope.”