"'This innovative collection of seventeen contributions to the ever-widening world of olfaction is insightful, erudite, and elegantly presented. The book uses mediality as the angel of approach in a truly interdisciplinary endeavor and underscores how the world is given to us synesthetically, across senses and scholarly disciplines, and how much fragrances provide the vital atmosphere.'--Professor Hans J. Rindisbacher, Pomona College. The study of scents and all things olfactory is thriving, a sign of the great interest that our information-based society feels for a sense that seems to offer a direct and immediate experience of reality. But smells resist description and representation, especially given that they are closely linked to individual personal experience, and their perception has changed through time and space in a myriad of ways. This volume aims to contribute to the flourishing multidisciplinary exchanges around smells by examining the question of their mediality, focusing on the mechanisms by which the olfactory experience, as well as the scents themselves, circulate and are diffused, but also by exploring the modes of smell as a medium in itself. Drawing on a wide variety of approaches, cultural zones, and historical periods, this volume gathers the contributions of twenty-one researchers who specialize in this field in order to explore the multiple aspects of olfactory culture, which characterizes and shapes our relations to smells"--Provided by publisher.
Cultural interactions: studies in the relationship between the arts,
Contributions both in English and French.
Préface / Chantal Jaquet -- Présentation = Presentation / Jean-Alexandre Perras et Érika Wicky -- Parfums. L'Osmothèque : une bibliothèque des évanescences / entretien avec Isabelle Reynaud-Chazot -- The art of hospitality : incense burners and the welcoming ceremony in the Medieval Islamic society (7th-15th cent.) / Sterenn Le Maguer-Gillon -- La poudre et le petit-maître en France et en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle : parfum de gloire, parfum de ruelle / Jean-Alexandre Perras -- 'Des parfums où la chair se damne' : entre séméiologie médicale et morale des apparences : L'odor di femmina et l'imaginaire fin-de-siècle / Eugénie Briot -- L'odeur des livres. Eduardo Kac, the olfactive poet / Ada Ackerman -- Preserving historic smells : the question of authenticity / Cecilia Bembibre and Matija Strlič -- 'L'odeur du cabinet, cette odeur liquoreuse, chaude de la fumée du tabac' : a linguistic approach to the necessary contextualisation of odours in Zola's Le ventre de Paris / Rémi Digonnet -- 'This [smelly] little world : smell and identity in Francis Brett Young's The young physician' / Ludmilla Jordanova and Jonathan Reinarz -- Images. Nommer et montrer l'odeur : étiquettes et contenants en parfumerie et cosmétique à la fin du XIXe siècle / Rosine Lheureux -- La peinture qui pue : les odeurs dans les salons caricaturaux français du XIXe siècle / Frédérique Desbuissons -- Représenter les parfums par la peinture (1850-1914) / Christina Bradstreet -- Architecture. Peter Sloterdijk : de la 'miasmologie' à l'Air Design / Manola Antonioli -- La chimie des fosses septiques parisiennes dans les années 1780 : miasmes et air vicié / Marie Sorger -- On the importance of habituation in the spatial mediality of smells / Suzel Balez -- Concerts olfactifs. Smell-sound synaesthesia as revelatory medium : a brief history with emphasis on German literature (1900-1930) / Frank Krause -- Concerts olfactifs fin-de-siècle : les parfums entre vibrations et matière / Giusy Pisano et Érika Wicky -- L'invention de l'orgue à senteurs : de l'interdépendance de la littérature et de l'objet technique / Sergej Rickenbacher.