Adopting a multidisciplinary approach called gastro-criticism that draws upon anthropology, sociology, semiotics, history, and literary studies, Ronald W. Tobin, Research Professor of French, UC Santa Barbara, elucidates the role of food, service, spectacle, diet, ingestion, and digestion in a number of works drawn from a variety of national literatures, from Greece and Rome through Germany, Italy, Spain, Mexico and on to the United States. In this virtual Zoom presentation Tobin concludes with specific reference to the seventeenth-century French comic dramatist Molière and his preoccupations with sexuality and power, pretense and pretentiousness, trickery and truth, self and society.

Although Emeritus since 2010, Ronald W. Tobin still holds the title of Research Professor of French from the University of California, Santa Barbara. PhD from Princeton, Dr. Tobin specializes in seventeenth-century French comedy and tragedy and has written or edited 16 books, notably Racine and Seneca, Tarte à la crème: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière’s Theater, and his latest, L’Aventure racinienne: un parcours franco-américain (Paris: L’Harmattan, July 2020). He has been knighted by the French government five times and is the recipient of a Grand Prix de l’Académie française.