Terrestrial Foods

terrestrial Foods , sometimes called more simply Foods , are a literary work of André Gide (1897), on the desire and the awakening of the directions.

It is not a question strictly speaking of a novel, but rather of a long prose poem, where a tinted sensuality of enthusiasm is expressed.

Gide develops the topic of the report/ratio to with it with the matter and the natural elements, in an at the same time lyric and sensual ode. Through work an enthusiasm quasi-extatic for the life shows through, making text a kind of Gospel of the awakening of the directions; indeed, it seems that the sensuality there acts almost as profession of faith, even new religion, so much one feels enthusiasm and of emotion there, in particular for the ground, harvests, the fruits, all that carnal and fleshy, all that can be pressed, is palpated, humé… The entire text can be regarded as a true anthem with the Libido sentiendi .

In filigree, it is as of sexuality and Eros as it acts, even if this topic is not really evoked in a direct way in the book. In this direction, one can interpret work like a hyperbole on the desire and the erotism, the evocation of the harvests and “foods” having value of symbol of the desired body. It is, above all, a book on the desire, on thirst, the evoked objects serving as a pretext for the expression of this desire, often inextinguishable, irrepressible, overflowing, which arrives to magnifier, to transcend the entire world. By certain aspects Foods recall sometimes biblical texts, in particular the Cantique of the Canticles. Besides one will note the importance of the Christian culture (at least in its strictly literary dimension) in the work of Gide (as the title attests some If the grain does not die , for example).

Foods are to some extent during merry and solar one De profundis of Oscar Wilde, work dark where the Irish writer also developed, but “into negative”, by the absence and the lack, a form of absolute sensuality which seeks to be freed from the skimped moralism of the time victorienne, of conformism and the social conventions (to be noted that the two authors had their homosexuality also in common).

It is one of the most known texts of Gide; a work inspired which causes still today the enthusiasm and the admiration of many readers, in particular among the teenagers.

The author then wrote and published new foods , much more tardily, in the years 1935.

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