Frederick Kaufman Analysis

Greg Smith is a novelist who lives in New York City. An undergraduate of Bowdoin College, Smith wrote four popular novels throughout the ‘90s and early 2000s, including The Divine Comedy of John Venner and The Devil in the Dooryard. Afterwards, Smith stopped writing novels so he would not be as far from his friends and family and wrote short stories instead. A majority of his short stories came together in issues known as The Midwest Quarterly, a collection of short stories and poems dealing with specific controversies. One of his issues of The Midwest Quarterly talks about literary criticism of fictional stories by popular authors. With Washington Irving’s case in criticism from Smith’s perspective, he writes about the ambiguity of Irving’s

The goal of the company is to discover what foods included in media (books and films) could be acceptable for public use. In this odd review called "Gut Reaction: The Enteric Terrors of Washington Irving", he criticizes Washington Irving’s works as a “sin” to food, from his poor portrayal of food to Ichabod Crane being a gluttonous for the wrong reasons. In Irving’s first known novel, “Diedrich Knickerbocker’s History of New York”, as Irving encourages people from around the world to visit New York for its beauty, he depicts the food of New York as a delicacy that puts other countries to shame. Kaufman, however, calls this action a “yankee action”, as Yankees enjoy to make pranks to fool people, meaning that Irving foolishly said that food in New York was the best in the world, even though higher and more expensive countries and empires had more delicious food than New York alone. Another example Kaufman talks about while describing Irving’s incorrect message of food is how Ichabod Crane from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is actually a glutton for food. The real reason Ichabod wanted to marry Katrina, according to Kaufman, was not because he wanted a proportion of her father’s wealth, but because he was after their food. Another trait of yankees is that they admire every kind of food they can get their hands on, which Ichabod highly admires. He wants nothing more of Katrina or her father except their food. I can understand with the second opinion, as many sentences in “Sleepy Hollow” deal with Ichabod’s obsession over rich and valuable food, but I do not understand why being a yankee makes Irving a complete prankster who loves food. It just does not make sense to me why somebody promoting their country as being an attention wannabe and why they should be criticized for the taste of his