Jamie Oliver as a Promoter of a Lifestyle: Recontextualisation of a Culinary Discourse and the Transformation of Cookbooks in Slovenia.

Tominc, Ana (2012) Jamie Oliver as a Promoter of a Lifestyle: Recontextualisation of a Culinary Discourse and the Transformation of Cookbooks in Slovenia. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the recontextualization and localization of global culinary discourse to Slovenia after its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and its transition into a free market economy. Slovenia and its emerging celebrity chefs, Luka and Valentina Novak, are an example of the 'local', whereas the global is represented by the British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. The study is based on culinary texts from Oliver and the Novaks' cookbooks. However, 'standard' Slovene cookbook texts are also analysed with the aim of showing the difference between the previous educational role of cookbooks and the contemporary, increasingly edutaining role of the new 'celebrity' cookbooks. This study is situated within critical discourse analysis and it generally draws on the methodological framework of the discourse-historical approach ('DHA') (Reisigl and Wodak 2001), but also combines this with theoretical insights from the dialectic-relational approach (Fairclough 2010, 1992, 2001 [1989]). Its underlying theoretical focus has been recontextualization, which is one of the salient concepts within 'CDA' (e. g. Wodak and Fairclough 2010; Chouliaraki 1998). The model of recontextualization that I presented in this thesis (based on the definition of discourse in 'DHA') enables me to show how global culinary discourse has been recontextualised from Britain to Slovenia, via, firstly, a translation of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks, and secondly, via the production of an original local discourse. The main claim of this thesis is that under the influence of global culinary discourse, local representations related to food and taste change, and so do cookbooks as genres. While recontextualization as translation results in appropriation of the text to the local circumstances in terms of genre conventions, branding opportunities, country-related representations (e. g. Italy) and the reconfirmation of the national identity, the second phase of recontextualisation reveals the characteristics of the locally produced discourse based on global characteristics. Compared to the 'standard' Slovene cookbooks, its 'celebrity' variant aims to reconstructs the national culinary identity via legitimation of the tastes of the new middle classes. Influenced by the global model, the Novaks' tend to represent food and foodstuffs relying on characteristics found in advertising while social actors are often synthetically personified (Fairclough 1989). Likewise, various perspectives construct a seemingly democratisized discourse and disperse the top-down authority as found in 'standard' cookbooks.