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Chapter 2 - The Drive-Thru Supermarket

Shopping Carts and the Foodscapes of American Literature

from Part I - Origins

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

The chapter argues that, while leading critiques of the supermarket often treat them as smooth and sinister systems of control, leading US literary accounts are likelier to emphasise the glitches, failures and petty frustrations of this familiar suburban foodscape. Reflecting this discrepancy, Ginsberg, Jarrell and others also call attention not only to the gleaming and vibrant commodities to be chosen from the supermarket shelf but also to the clattering functionality of the borrowed cart which then hold these choices before presenting them to the checkout. These writers, I suggest, attribute to such carts a different mode of walking, quite unlike the leisurely strolling of earlier or fin de siècle modes of shopping. A new and anxious need to return home instead underpins movement in the supermarket as these writers represent it, and this new compulsion becomes associated in their work with their failure occupy the 
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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