Adopting a multidisciplinary approach called gastro-criticism that draws upon anthropology, sociology, semiotics, history, and literary studies, Professor Ronald Tobin, Associate Vice Chancellor, UC Santa Barbara, elucidates the role of food, service, spectacle, diet, ingestion, and digestion in a number of works drawn from a variety of national literatures. He concludes with specific reference to the seventeenth-century French comic dramatist Molière and his preoccupations with sexuality and power, pretense and pretentiousness, trickery and truth, self and society. (#16255)