Sean Chadwell
Do Large Italian American
Families Really Eat at the Olive Garden? Ethnic Food Marketing and the
Consumption of Authenticity
In a recent New York Times review of cookbooks, Thomas
MacNamee writes:
“Authentic” is a
funny word. In a lot of recent books about food and cooking, authenticity seems
to entail being somebody entirely other than who you actually are. Enter the
magical kingdom of the book and you become a Vietnamese farmer, a Manhattan chef, your great-grandmother, a
Roman housewife. Of course, these transformations are fundamentally impossible.
You’re still you — you’re just pretending. And so ‘authentic’ comes to mean its
opposite. . . . let’s face it, the only truly authentic spaghetti carbonara is
made by Romans in Rome. Does this mean that American cooking enthusiasts, we
supremely multicultural omnivores, are condemned to inhabit a culinary Epcot, a
universe of simulations?
That MacNamee characterizes the impossibility of
“authentic” food preparation as a condemnation to “a culinary Epcot” may reveal
as much about food as it does about the apparent parallels between being a
tourist and being a diner. EPCOT, as many people know, is a Disney-constructed
amalgamation of “world showcases,” “pavilions” at which the overstated unicultures
of various countries are displayed to the ostensible edification and
questionable pleasure of tourists. MacNamee’s “culinary Epcot” weds tourism to
food even more concretely than his insinuation that one must travel to Rome for
“truly authentic” spaghetti carbonara: as MacNamee is surely aware, the trip to
Rome only leads to more specific question: restaurant or residence? what cook?
ingredients from which market? the cumulative effect of which obviate the question of authenticity
altogether by reducing it to an element of consumer vocabulary. To get
authentic dishes, MacNamee and others seem to be suggesting, one must elide the
concept—and the vocabulary—altogether.
In the introduction to a recent restaurant review, also for
the Times, writer Eric Asimov offers a brief history of
contemporary trends in Italian eateries:
As Americans got to
know the pleasures of authentic Italian regional cuisines in the last 15 years,
old-fashioned Italian-American cooking became themebound, buried under a corny
torrent of fake forebears and canned opera. The 1990’s rise of the family-style
Italian restaurant, which served portions by the bucketful, called for huge
groups, replicating a nostalgic image of big, boisterous Italian families. With
one wave of a garlic-bread wand, these restaurants offered a vision of the past
through a red-and-white-check lens.
Now I enjoy garlic-drenched linguine
with clam sauce and platters of sausages and peppers as much as the next
person, but I find it hard to eat surrounded by portraits of imaginary
ancestors with the theme from “The Godfather” playing again and again.
Asimov’s review, in which he praises a restaurant for
its success in “remov[ing] the meal from the mythology,” suggests that it is
not simply authenticity in preparation that has come to represent real ethnic
dining; in fact, Asimov’s unusual disinterest in the authenticity of the dishes
stems from his attention to the ways in which restaurants have made claims
about the authenticity of the experience of dining. Asimov seems
disturbed by the simulated atmosphere of these kinds of restaurants, even as he
enjoys “garlic-drenched linguine with clam sauce.” This approach highlights
another of the consistent arguments concerning authenticity in ethnic
cuisines—and one also implied in MacNamee’s invocation of EPCOT—namely, that
the degree of attention given to the simulation of a dining environment is
indirectly proportional to the degree of actual authenticity in preparation.
An academic example of the attention devoted to culinary
authenticity is provided by Jeremy MacClancy in his book Consuming Culture:
Why You Eat What You Eat. MacClancy opens a chapter called “Eating the
Other” with the observation that “[t]he irony underlying this sort of
gastronomic tourism is that all too often the food purveyed as exotic and
foreign is not as authentically ‘other’ as most consumers would like to
imagine” (204). In the conclusion to
the same chapter, he makes another observation: “Some food writers try to
pigeonhole other cultures according to their own ghastly good taste. They think
of cuisines as something static and hermetically sealed. But this jam-jar
approach to foreign ways of cooking ignores the fact that the world turns and
people with it” (208). The distinction between these two assertions—one that
initially seems paradoxical: either foods can be authentic, it would seem, or
cannot—importantly highlights the role of the consumer and his or her set of
ideas about food and culture: the rube who believes that Chili con Carne is
Mexican or that Chop Suey is Chinese, to borrow a pair of MacClancy’s
examples.
A final recent academic example, Donna Gabaccia’s We Are
What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans, opens with a delightfully
detailed account of the growth in worldwide bagel consumption:
The history of the
bagel suggests that Americans’ shifting, blended, multi-ethnic eating habits
are signs neither of postmodern decadence, ethnic fragmentation, nor corporate
hegemony. If we do not understand how a bagel could sometimes be Jewish,
sometimes be “New York” and some times be American, or why it is that
Pakistanis now sell bagels to both Anglos and Tejanos in Houston, it is in part
because we have too hastily assumed that our tendency to cross cultural
boundaries in order to eat ethnic foods is a recent development—and a culinary
symptom of all that has gone wrong with contemporary culture. (5)
Indeed, Gabaccia acknowledges that she tries “to steer between two interpretive
poles in the history of American food” (235). One either holds that, as does
historian Daniel Boorstin, the blending and industrialization of foods is a
democratization of tastes or that, as Gabaccia says of critics like John L.
Hess and Karen Hess, “multi-ethnic regional cuisines [are] definers of
genuinely American tastes” (235). Gabaccia, like MacClancy, seems devoted to
talking about food in new ways and in eschewing the privileging of the idea of
authenticity in order to discuss more clearly the ways in which our eating
practices have evolved.
Perhaps most importantly, however, MacNamee, Asimov,
MacClancy, and Gabaccia share a concern with culinary authenticity that
ultimately and necessarily reverts to discussions of consumption. Obviously any discussion of the politics or
economy of food must necessarily address consumption, especially if that
discussion endeavors to address authenticity. Food itself is, as we all know,
for eating, but what about authenticity? While authenticity cannot be subject
to mastication, it can ostensibly be consumed. Our cultural preoccupation with
authentic foods may in fact be rooted in a continually frustrated fantasy in
which we are capable, thanks to the projection of authenticity onto food, of actually
consuming a conceptual commodity. Because of its obvious and
necessary role, food is the ideal vehicle for this other kind of transaction.
Continually promised utopias by advertisements for new cars, cellular phones,
and disposable diapers and simultaneously bombarded by the promise of cultural
capital inherent in a visit to a traveling exposition of, say, Renoir’s
“greatest hits,” diners at Johnny Carino’s Country Italian, a restaurant chain
discussed below, are encouraged to believe they are finally consuming something
less tangible but more valuable than just victuals.
Consumers are encouraged to believe they can “consume
authenticity” in the first place by the marketing of authenticity as such;
because it is an idea, however, and not a thing, I have here labeled authenticity
a “conceptual commodity.” Studies of tourism and tourist consumption of
artifacts can perhaps help to clarify this terminology; in the introduction to
their collection Unpacking Culture, Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B.
Steiner discuss the evolution of the commodification of the “authentic
artifact.” Although the focus of their argument has to do with the importance
of adding the third element of conomics to the traditional, limited, academic
dichotomy between art and artifact, their brief history of the rise of the
artifact market and ensuing accusations of “inauthenticity” among academicians
and tourists demonstrates the mobility of the term “authentic” and the market’s
demand for this mobility. Their early history of touristic consumption of art
and artifacts and the linking of the authenticity of the artifact/souvenir to
the experience of tourism itself
happens nicely to parallel the history of ethnic dining in the United
States, in which the mass production of the markers of authenticity eventually
led diners like Asimov, cited above, to bemoan the procession of simulacra.
Moreover, as also in Asimov’s case, some contemporary diners see a potential
for authenticity manifest in the very absence of such simulacra; this
parallels a Victorian-era touristic practice described by Phillips and Steiner,
one in which “travelers” distinguished themselves from “tourists” (9).
Finally, it should not be inferred that this analysis of the
cultural attitudes surrounding authenticity and consumption seeks to condemn
mass or marketing culture for corrupting the folk practices of “genuine”
people. Instead, I mean here only to examine the marketing impact on the
concept of authenticity; indeed, it may be that authenticity in capitalism can
be nothing other than commodity even to those in academic disciplines who
confer authenticity on art and/or artifacts. But perhaps the most deeply ironic
aspect of the reduction of the concept of authenticity to a conceptual
commodity is that the mass production of authenticity would not only seem to
threaten authenticity itself, but the mass-production market in which it is so
ostensibly prized. Phillips and Steiner
respond to this paradox by suggesting that those native peoples involved in the
mass-production of artifacts were themselves experiencing no less authentic
relationships to the mode of production and that, in other words, the artifacts
they worked to manufacture were authentic in yet another way (9). By
considering the commercial training of consumers, critical work on authenticity
by Regina Bendix and others, and some aspects of the history of ethnic dining
in the United States, I will propose that the notion of authenticity has itself
become a marketable and marketed commodity.
I propose, moreover, that because authenticity itself is not
mass-reproducible, the marketing coup de grace lies in the managed
slippage, which is parallel to the slippage between “eating” and “consuming”
and the slippage between “eating authentic” and “eating authentically.”
Diner Training
The Olive Garden Italian restaurant chain has recently been
airing commercials loosely organized around the activity of
ritualized-yet-casual family dining. These advertisements generally involve a
large and brazenly stereotypical Italian family dining out in the only
restaurant at which, reportedly, they
are willing to dine collectively. They do so, it is to be inferred, because The
Olive Garden matches their expectations of the dining experience; there they
all sit, a dozen to a table, passing bread and other dishes in every direction,
everyone talking at once. The cultural logic supporting this kind of ad
campaign is obvious: the specific family event and the specific family approval
of the Olive Garden work to counter the notion of the Olive Garden as a
tremendously general enterprise, one whose institutional size necessitates
homogeneity, simplicity of preparation, simplicity of scope, and a menu that
provides just the right semantic clues about the food, that uses just the right
kinds of pasta names. In providing us with the image of the specific family
enjoying these foods and this atmosphere, the Olive Garden’s ad agency hopes to
undercut the necessary assumption concerning chains: that there is nothing
specific about them.
Of course, the underlying irony of the ad campaign runs
parallel to the above-stated irony of claims to authenticity, generally: in
order to persuade us that this is a specific Italian family, the marketers rely
on stereotyped language and behavior; this is a specific Italian family, then,
that is virtually indistinguishable from broader cultural notions about how
Italian families behave, what they eat, and what they look like. How is this
attempt to represent the specific by resorting to the general obscured in a
commercial whose implicit argument concerns the authenticity of the menu items
available in every corner of the United States identically prepared and
seasoned? The same approach as the semantic clues on the menu: the very family
that authenticates the food may itself be a tired stereotype, but the principal
speaker, a handsome, dark-haired man in his mid-thirties talks in a voice-over
about the distinguishing features of those family members seated around
him. He confides that his cousin is
vain, as she gazes furtively into a compact mirror and that his grandfather
loves to tell stories, as we see a frumpy grandfather figure holding sway at
the table. The individuation and specification of family members by means of
more generalized stereotypes is a mysteriously effective approach. The message:
this family and its members are unique—as we all are—and this food they consume
is also unique—like no other food available.
But these commercials also work on another not-so-obvious
level: though they claim to be about food, they are also about the physical act
and style of consumption. The accompanying images, which serve to convince us
of the vanity of the cousin or the verbosity of the grandfather, also quietly
exhibit the activity of eating, of consuming: people are passing dishes around
the table, hands from unseen diners reach out to grab bread sticks, family
members eat from one another’s plates, the salad is tossed and served by a
member at the center of the table. These activities are part of a language of
ritual, of the “traditions” of family dining. When Walter Benjamin observed
that “[t]he uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded
in the fabric of tradition,” (233) he was not, of course, talking about Italian
food; but the pertinence of his comments to a discussion of authenticity in
mass-reproducible foodstuffs is unmistakable: marketers of ethnic food chain
restaurants have effectively applied Benjamin’s argument in reverse. The consumer knows that these foods are
authentic because the foods appear embedded in a “fabric of tradition.” And
while the argument is on one level still about the authenticity of the food, at
quite another level it is a kind of diner training, a demonstration of the
habits and activities of eaters of authentic food. If one can, by dipping bread
into olive oil like the people on TV or being surrounded, as Asimov points out,
by pictures of Italian relatives, bring the fabric of tradition to the table,
then surely one can consume authentically, if not authentic.
Diner training often occurs at restaurants themselves. At
“Johnny Carino’s Country Italian,” meals always begin with a small loaf of
Italian bread delivered to the table with a saucer of browned chopped garlic;
the waiter, requesting that someone at the table hand him a decanter of olive
oil, proceeds to prepare a simple, tasty dip for the bread. The waiter then
instructs the diners that this is for the dipping of bread. Mysteriously, one
either understands implicitly or learns very quickly that the bread is to be
broken by hand and shared. This simple ritual encourages the diner to collapse
the act of eating authentically into the act of eating authentic food. The act
of bread-dipping, by inculcating the diner into a ritual practice, serves to
situate the food itself within a “fabric of tradition.” Moreover, the diner,
who is here most like the tourist, is consuming the ritual itself as a part of
the dining experience. But this, again, is a kind of fantastic, if putative, fulfillment of the tourist
experience: the oil and bread and ritual finally collapse into the perceived
ingestion of the commodity of authenticity.
Likewise, the menu at
Johnny Carino’s links the conceptual commodity to the food itself: “Johnny’s
Country Italian . . . means we offer authentic food like homemade
lasagna and manicotti . . . we bake our own bread . . . we cook homemade
pizzas with fresh vegetables and our own sausage in a wood fired oven . . . we
make our Tiramisu from old family recipes . . . we bring real food
to you that was meant for sharing” (emphasis added). Clearly, the menu author does not seek to convince his or her
audience of the reality or authenticity of the food; rather, it is an
argument about the authenticity of preparation. But, given the ways in which
this discussion is embedded in language about familial ritual by the terms
“homemade,” “old family,” “sharing”, these claims are at least partly about
situating the food within the fabric of tradition. Moreover, the promise of the
ability actually to consume authenticity is most clearly articulated here in
the otherwise nonsense phrases “authentic food” and “real food.”
Background
To understand the roots of these kinds of claims of
authenticity, it is useful briefly to consider the popular history of food in
the United States. One source of information about nineteenth-centurey eating
habits is Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table. His careful
attention to the rise of haute cuisine and, generally, French styles of
cooking as they began to make cultural headway in the United States makes clear
the importance of class associations with dining habits. Levenstein discusses
the surge of popularity of French-style cooking in the United States in the
post-civil war era:
The ascendancy of
French cooking is evident in many of the menus that survive from the upper and
upper-middle-class hotels of the postwar era. In the late 1860s and early 1870s
they tended to be mainly English and American in their offerings and language,
with only an occasional French touch. By the mid- and late 1870s, however, a
wholesale invasion of French terms and French dishes was under way. (15)
He points out that the middle classes had only just
begun to assimilate French styles of cooking into home cooking foods by the
1880s. In other words, people began integrating and imitating styles of cooking;
that there were restaurants like the famous Delmonico’s, offering “French”
style food cooked by French chefs cannot be argued, but authenticity does not
seem to have been an element of middle-class consumerism. In fact, in his
examination of cookbooks written for a middle-class audience, Levenstein is
able to plot a slow but steady crossover to French styles. Here, too, what
Levenstein makes clear is that the styles themselves were evolving, not the
attention to them as such.
Levenstein, Gabaccia and others have all pointed out that the
first stage of the industrialization of food production and distribution
coincided with a shift in thinking about diet, caloric intake, and other
aspects of food consumption. From about 1880 until 1920, or so, there were
gradual but massive changes in two categories: 1) what people ate; and 2) how
food was distributed, packaged, and shipped (Levenstein 45-85). Further, as
Levenstein convincingly demonstrates in a chapter called “New Reformers and New
Immigrants,” a great deal of attention was directed at immigrant eating habits,
especially in the first two decades of the twentieth century; social workers
complained bitterly, for example, that immigrant Italian families were wasting
their money buying pasta and Romano cheese at their neighborhood grocer’s
instead of purchasing white bread and midwestern beef from the supermarket.
Given the emphasis on Americanizing the eating habits of the
immigrant lower and middle class, it would be a while before other forms of
cooking and eating were even recognized, much less valued. This happened,
according to Gabaccia, with the importance of food rationing during the
WWII. She writes:
At the close of a
[Common Council for American Unity] meeting, foreign- born housewives offered
newspaper reporters an attractive array of dishes they had prepared. A press
release . . . emphasized that “European
housewives had had to use meat substitutes . . . Age-long shortages have
conditioned them to rationing long before it became a war-time rule here in
America, and they have evolved succulent dishes . . .” She appended to her
release a recipe for eggplant “parmiciana” . . . (145)
Aside from the typical identification of eggplant as a “meat substitute,”
this reporter’s stance (and in general the Council’s stance) is markedly
different in its relationship to immigrant styles of cooking. From the early
40s, we can observe that ethnic cuisines at least began to be recognized as
legitimate in terms of diet. It is worth mentioning that this is also the
period in which writers such as M.F.K. Fisher began seriously and specifically
to explore the ethnic and regional culinary dimensions of dining out.
These, then, were the major trends: industrialization and
massive distribution of foods; a continuing upper-class haute cuisine
influence; the gradual integration of ethnic styles into American middle-class
cuisine, that itself had been under a heavy homogenizing influence for 40 or so
years. These things were happening in
the context of modernity, with its attendant discussions about class and “high”
culture contrasting “low” culture, a period in which slick, cheap canned
products were reaching bigger and bigger markets and becoming less and less distinct.
Gabaccia writes, for instance of the growth of the Chef Boyardee line of
“Spaghetti-O’s”: Boyardee-created by an actual Chef Boiardi, had become a large
business by selling canned spaghetti to a national market, but, as she notes
“the boomers and their mothers who ate canned Boyardee spaghetti in the 1950s
no longer bought the product from immigrant businessman Boiardi. In 1946 he had
sold his company to American Home Foods” (150). While Gabaccia is not
suggesting that consumers purchased canned spaghetti for its perceived loyalty
to Italian food, her example highlights an important point in the history of
ethnic cuisines in this country: mass reproduction helped to create a culinary
atmosphere in which discussions of authenticity could possibly take place among
middle-class, consuming Americans.
The Art of Eating in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The objection that spaghetti and spaghetti-o’s cannot fall
within a discussion of the reproduction of art itself rests at least partly on
a notion of authenticity that is firmly rooted in market capitalism. Benjamin
writes, at the beginning of the fourth part of his famous essay:
The uniqueness of a
work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition.
This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient
statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the
Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the
Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were
equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. (223)
It is aura, according to Benjamin, that is lost in
the mechanical reproduction of art in the twentieth century. In the discussion,
he draws an important link between the original work of art and ritual: “the
instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic
production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on
ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (224). The food
produced and marketed to the twentieth-century American middle class has itself
been a victim of the loss of aura. If I may substitute the category of “Italian
Food” for “Art,” the ritual that Benjamin connects to the authenticity of
Italian cuisine is easy enough to read in the activity of producing and eating
a meal in a kind of admittedly idealized Italian home. Importantly, the ritual
here concerns the food and traditional activities related to aroma, activity,
color. By extension, we can identify the reversal—the politics—involved in the
de-authenticated mass reproduction of those foods: among the results is what
amounts to an affirmation of Italian stereotypes and spaghetti with red sauce.
The issue of whether or not Chef Boyardee products are
“authentically Italian” points out—in an analogy of cultural modernism—that the
distinction between high and popular forms of cooking is fading into practices
of consumerism. The concern with and
consumption of what are ostensibly authentically prepared ethnic foods seems to
represent a middle-class act, as Jeremy MacClancy’s title reminds us, of “consuming culture” in order to assimilate
it and, in short, to associate with the “high” culture of cuisine,
exemplified by spaghetti carbonara, rather than the “pop” culture of
mass-produced foods exemplified by Chef
Boyardee canned pasta.
We do not need to assume that “high” cuisine means expensive
or exclusive; the implication is one of taste. To know that a given restaurant provides an example of authentic
Mexican food, for example, is not necessarily the same as paying a great deal
of money for that particular meal. Instead, if one has the knowledge to be able
to identify a cuisine as specifically “ethnic,” the underlying assumption is
that this person does not frequently inhabit the world of popular food culture.
The prejudice toward restaurants that do not attempt overtly to signify
ethnicity in decor (one shared by Asimov, above), emanates from claims to
authority on the part of the “knower.” Regina Bendix writes:
The search for
authenticity is fundamentally an emotional and moral quest. But this
experiential dimension does not provide lasting satisfaction, and authenticity
needs to be augmented with pragmatic and evaluative dimensions. Declaring
something authentic legitimated the subject that was declared authentic, and
the declaration in turn can legitimate the authenticator, though here such
concerns as social standing, education and the ability to promote one’s views
also play a role. Processes of authentication bring about material
representations by elevating the authenticated into the category of the
noteworthy. In the last decades of the twentieth century this process has
accelerated exponentially, and so much has been declared authentic that the
scarcity value is evaporating: once tomato sauce carries the label “authentic,”
the designation loses its special significance. (7)
Bendix here highlights two of the principal issues in
discussions of authenticity, namely that the act of authenticating may have as
much to do with the authenticator as the authenticatee and that the end of the
twentieth century has seen a glut of authenticity, so much so that the
designation “authentic” itself is threatened. While Bendix’s point here takes
place in the context of a discussion about the value of authenticity to the
academy (specifically to anthropologists), it also aptly describes the
evolution of claims to authenticity in ethnic dining, as the use of the example
of tomato sauce makes clear. However, it is by means of that slippage between
“eating authentic” and “eating authentically” that the concept of authenticity
as applied ethnic cuisines does not become diluted by its heavy use. On the
contrary, what Bendix identifies as “an experimental dimension” that “does not
provide lasting satisfaction” for folklorists, is continually promoted to
potential diners as an actual dimension that can and will provide lasting
satisfaction.
Moreover, the extent to which these foods themselves have
come to represent the genre of Italian food for a growing number of consumers
in the United States is an excellent example of the kind of reorganization of
cultural meaning that frequently takes place in this country. Looking back,
again, at the history of the early twentieth century, we can see a strong
desire to rid Italians of their nasty, unhealthy eating habits, a desire rooted
in part in a need to “Americanize” these citizens. With the gradual association
of the consumption of ethnic cuisines with knowledge, culture, and taste, comes
the need to produce those cuisines, indeed, the need to produce authentic
versions and sell these on television. All of this naturally echoes
Baudrillard, who writes in Simulations:
When the real is no
longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a
proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth,
objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived
experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance
have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the
referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production . . . (13)
It is, it seems, a kind of panic-stricken consumption
of the real that we witness in the success of such restaurants as the Olive
Garden; “the proliferation of myths and origin and signs of reality” are there
in the commercials, the literature, the menu. The “real” of Italian cooking in
the United States is certainly no longer what it used to be—no longer any
surreptitious trips to the local grocer to buy Romano cheese instead of milk,
despite the unpleasant remonstrations by the social worker—and it has thus
itself become a kind of idealized referent, to the extent that a restaurant
chain can, without irony, claim to offer “homemade tiramisu,” a dessert plate
of simulacra, tasty, of course, but whose fat and calories, almost always a
part of the restaurant discussion, are the primary assurances of the reality
before us.
The larger cultural effect, finally, of this panic stricken
production and consumption, is, it seems, a paradoxical increasing general
concern with the “real.” The distinction between the notions of class
identification and culinary awareness becomes increasingly hard to make in an
atmosphere in which the marketing of food operates with what seems to be an
awareness of the importance of class identification and the authenticity of
ethnic food. The result appears, finally, to be a proliferation of claims to
authenticity, claims that subtly and not-so-subtly suggest that authenticity is
as real and satisfying as broken bread dipped in olive oil.
Sean Chadwell
Department of
Language and Literature
Texas A & M
International University
5201 University
Boulevard
Laredo, Texas
78041-1900
Works Cited
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1983.
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Wisconsin P, 1997.
Benjamin, Walter. “The
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