Mapes highlights how the dismissal of food privilege has become everyday. Readers of Elite Authenticity can feel that this is 'the right kind of' elitism: uncomfortable to dismiss but hard to ignore.

Autorentext
Gwynne Mapes is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She has recent papers published in Journal of Sociolinguistics, Discourse, Context & Media, Language and Communication, and Language in Society.

Klappentext

This is a book about how people talk and write about food - in the New York Times, on social media, in restaurants, and around the dinner table. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, Mapes focuses in particular on how "authenticity" proliferates in these various examples of "elite food discourse," and how it is used by stakeholders to simultaneously claim and deny social prestige. By emphasizing things like simplicity, historicity, and locality/sustainability (among others), people downplay their eliteness on the grounds of "good taste" and responsible consumerism. Ultimately, this work is a critique of that ways in which contemporary food practices (re)inforce status competition and class hierarchy.

Zusammenfassung
Food plays a central role in the production of culture and is likewise a powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (its substance, its raw economics, and its manufacture or preparation) and through its discursivity (its marketing, staging, and the way it is depicted and discussed). This intersection of materiality and discursivity makes food an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations, and for engaging cutting-edge debates in sociolinguistics on language materiality. In Elite Authenticity, Gwynne Mapes integrates theories of mediatization, materiality, and authenticity in order to explore the discursive production of elite status and class inequality in food discourse. Relying on a range of methodological approaches, Mapes examines restaurant reviews and articles published in the New York Times food section; a collection of Instagram posts from @nytfood; ethnographically-informed fieldwork in four renowned Brooklyn, NY, restaurants; and a recorded dinner conversation with six food-enthusiasts. Across these varied genres of data, she demonstrates how a discourse of "elite authenticity" represents a particular surfacing of rhetorical maneuvers in which distinction is orchestrated, avowed/disavowed, and circulated. Elite Authenticity takes a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, drawing on theories from linguistics, food and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Its presentation and analysis of aural, visual, spatial, material, and embodied discourse will be of interest to scholars and students of communication studies, critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural geography.

Inhalt

• Chapter One. Introduction: Elite Food Discourse

• Elite Pancakes: A Taste of Things to Come

• Social Class

• The Rhetorics of Food

• Materiality and Language Materiality

• Terroir and Authenticity

• Method

• Overview

• Chapter Two. Mediatizing Taste: Elite Authenticity in New York Times Food Section Articles

• Combining "Elite" and "Authenticity"

• Media Discourse and Mediatization

• Data and Case Study Design

• The Discourse of Elite Authenticity

• Disciplining Eaters

• Chapter Three. Between Rough and Refined: Fetishism and Condescension in @nytfood Instagram Posts

• The Juxtaposition of "High" and "Low"

• Fetishism and Food Porn

• Condescension and the Linguistic Marketplace

• Social Media and Social Capital

• Data and Case Study Design

• Between Rough and Refined

• Normalizing Classlessness

• Chapter Four. Co-constructing the Fashionable Eater: Orders of Elitist Stancetaking in "throwback Thursday" Instagram Posts

• What Not to Eat

• Stance and Elitist Stancetaking

• Data and Case Study Design

• The Orders of Elitist Stancetaking

• The "vengeful present tense in which Fashion speaks"

• Chapter Five. Spatializing Authenticity: The Micro-landscapes in/of Brooklyn Restaurants

• Place-making and Privileged Eating

• Spatiality and Semiotic Landscapes

• Data and Case Study Design

• Spatializing Elite Authenticity

• Producing and Occupying Elite Space

• Chapter Six. Food "insiders": (Dis)avowing distinction over dinner

• Interactionally-achieved Elite Eating

• Dinner Conversations and Communities of Practice

• Data and Case Study Design

• The Simultaneous (Dis)avowal of Distinction

• Everyday Elite Authenticity

• Chapter Seven. Conclusion: Globalizing Elite Authenticity

• The Iterations of Elite Authenticity

• Globalizing Elite Authenticity

• So How Shall We Live?

• Index