Senior Thesis and Faculty Profile

 

 

 

 

Stephanie Stiavetti came to UC Berkeley as a transfer student. In her honors thesis, she aims to understand how two literary works dealing with cooking, namely “Babette’s Feast” and “Like Water for Chocolate” establish the sanctity of food in relation to religious practice.

Stephanie’s goal is to answers several questions in the course of her research: How do food and faith correlate, and how are these correlations articulated differently in these two texts? How do gender expectations shape the lives of the heroines? In telling the stories of two women, Babette Harsant and Tita de la Garza, these texts indeed asseverate a link between the spirituality that is inherent in each heroine and the gender issues that arise when their faith can only manifest itself in the location where they spend the vast majority of their lives: the kitchen.

 

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Hertha Sweet Wong is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the English Department at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of “Sending My Heart Back Across the Years: Tradition and Innovation in Native American Autobiography” (Oxford UP, 1992) as well as numerous articles on Native American literature, autobiography, and environmental non-fiction published in edited volumes, including: “Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader” (edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, U of Wisconsin P), “Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fiction and Fictive Communities” (edited by J. Gerald Kennedy, Cambridge UP), “Autobiography and Postmodernism” (edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore, and Gerald Peters, U of Massachusetts P), “Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities” (edited by Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, U of Tennessee P), “The American Literary History Reader” (edited by Gordon Hutner, Oxford UP), “American Nature Writers” (edited by John Elder, Charles Scribner’s Sons).

Further, Prof. Sweet Wong’s writings have been published in journals such as American Literary History, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, MELUS, and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review.

With John Elder, she is co-editor of Family of Earth and Sky: Indigenous Tales of Nature from around the World (Beacon, 1994). Most recently, she is editor of Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine”: A Casebook (part of William L. Andrew’s Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction series, Oxford UP, 2000) and co-editor of Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women (Oxford UP, 2008). Currently, she is writing a book on visual autobiography.