Hitchcock's Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread

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This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. In Hitchcocks Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcocks body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcocks films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcocks Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

Reviews

Deliciously fat with insights into Alfred Hitchcock's life and work, this book is about so many other things, too: appetite, weight, the body, gender, sexuality, childhood, the cinema. Casey McKittrick argues in this tantalizing study that we cannot fully grasp Hitchcock's film oeuvre without examining his life as a fat man. Drawing on fat studies as well as queer theory, McKittrick adds depth and nuance to our picture of the great director and his legendary appetitesand to our collective appetite for him. Highly recommended * Kenneth Kidd, Professor of English, University of Florida, USA *
The provocative relationship between cinematic form and the authorial body is pleasurably realized in Casey McKittricks Hitchcocks Appetites: The Corpulent Plots of Desire and Dread. Through a seductive theoretical dance and a plunge into persuasive close readings, McKittrick guides us along the biographical and aesthetic contours that give shape to Alfred Hitchcocks highly recognizable body, a large and distinctive body that intimately commingles with his body of work. Rethinking appetite as visceral desire, Hitchcocks Appetites delights in the directors fatnesshis queerness to be sureso as to draw out the sensual possibilities that fold the auteur and cinematic aesthetics into one another. * David A. Gerstner, Professor of Cinema Studies, City University of New York, USA *
A superb appreciation of Hitchcocks appetites, a brilliant analysis of corporeality in the corpus of Hitchcock films, this exquisitely written and methodologically innovative book satisfies as it induces hunger. McKittrick moves adroitly between Hitchcocks household meal plans, the archive of his relationships with Hollywood stars and producers, virtuosic readings of the films themselves, the problems of embodiment in queer theory, and the promise of fat studies to write the definitive Hitchcock book for our times. * Neville Hoad, Associate Professor of English, University of Texas at Austin, USA *

Author Bio

Casey McKittrick is an Associate Professor of English at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA. He regularly teaches courses in Film Interpretation, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, African American Literature, and American Literature surveys. He has published essays in The Velvet Light Trap, the anthologies Writing as Re-Vision and Porn and Philosophy, and reviews in several film and gender studies journals.