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Reviews381 does in fact occur, it may contribute to a magical transformation of our perception of ourselves and the world around us" (p. 199)—shades of G. Wilson Knight. This pious hope, which many may share, alas founders on the lack of evidence that reactions to The Tempest have produced any such result. Ironically, the author who has so sensibly and knowledgeably examined the impact of Renaissance magic becomes a critical enthusiast, throwing off some desired restraints. Certainly the interpretation of The Tempest needs the antidote of The Alchemist to diminish its critical excesses. In my judgment, the first half of this book succeeds better than the second (the literary analyses). The nearly 100 pages of notes and bibliography will prove especially valuable. DAVID M. BERGERON University of Kansas Ronald W. Tobin. Tarte à la crème: Comedy and Gastronomy in Molière's Theater. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 219. $32.50. Despite what its title might otherwise suggest, Tarte à la crème is by no means a light and flaky confection. On the contrary, this is a serious and learned book that illuminates in an original and penetrating way some important aspects of Molière's comic theater. The approach through gastronomy (i.e., the selection, preparation, service, and consumption of food) proves to be a particularly apt and effective methodology, for the culinary arts have traditionally played a pivotal role in the history of cultural discourse in France. Moreover, as Tobin observes, gastronomy has inherently strong ties with both language and literature since ingestion and expression are allied activities that find a common basis in a shared system of articulation. Because eating and speaking are such closely related oral acts, he notes, the poet and the cook come to possess a natural kinship: they both perform "an archetypal, sacred, and creative act that produces original, complex products which change the consumer emotionally, intellectually, and physically." In Tarte à la crème, Tobin provides analyses of those eight Molière comedies in which gastronomy—as a conveyor of linguistic, semiotic, aesthetic, structural, philosophical, or psychological codes—can be seen to play a significant part. In terms of its organization, this book is arranged after the pattern of a meal: thus the reader is served up an avant-propos (Preface), an hors d'oeuvre (Introduction), seven different "services" (chapters on the individual plays), a ragoût (on La Critique de L'Ecole des femmes) and an entremet (on L'Impromptu de Versailles) as well as a "dessert" (Conclusion) and a "list of ingredients" (Bibliography ). In each of his "gastrocritical" analyses, the author seeks primarily to elucidate, through an examination of food imagery, culinary practice, and eating metaphors, the structural dynamics at work in the particular play under investigation. In L'École des femmes (1662), for instance, the romantic competition for Agnès' love between the violently aggressive Arnolphe and the gentle, hedonistic Horace is interpreted as a semiotic collision between the 382Comparative Drama code of power, communicated by the verb manger ("to devour"), and the code of pleasure, with its concomitant notion of goûter ("to taste"). Aesthetics rather than semiotics guides Tobin's discussion of La Critique de L'École des femmes (1663), where the concept of taste is explored as a tension between the sensual (bon goût) and the rational (bon sens). Structural myth, meanwhile, dominates his approach to Dom Juan, ou le Festin en pierre (1665), whose Herculean protagonist moves ineluctably toward a fateful final feast, the promised "stone banquet," where divine retribution (exacted against the hero for his sybaritic philosophy) banishes the conviviality, reconciliation, and communion that one would normally expect to find in a gastronomical event of this kind. In Amphitryon (1668), food is shown to function as an agent of reciprocity, as a basic ingredient in a "potlatch" pattern of mutual giftgiving that allows Molière satirically to juxtapose the aristocratic sense of duty, honor, and obligation against the bourgeois notion of commercialism , mercantilism, and commodity exchange. In L'Avare (1668), we witness how food, traditionally a positive symbol of life-affirmation and pleasure, is devalorized by the miserly Harpagon, who by advocating starvation (fasting) rather than nutrition (feasting) stands ultimately...

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