The "second brain": dietetic and ideology in Nineteenth-Century France
Résumé
This essay analyses the symbolism of the “second brain”, revealing the functions and meanings of this physiological imaginary during the nineteenth century. This imaginary often served a normative system: the stomach was allegorical since knowing how to digest meant knowing how to live, and metonymic since the physiology of digestion served as a model for the physiology of the brain, thought and the body. In both cases, digestion offered a model of meaning and interpretation. On an aesthetic level, the new norm played on the ambivalence of taste to give a physiological foundation to aesthetic canons being defended. “Dietetic” criticism of works of art revealed how physiological and literary discourse interacted in this period in the service of ideology.