Structures of the Sensible: Smelling and Tasting the Text after World War I
The period following the First World War profoundly challenged the familiar structures of the human sensorium: the global aftershocks of the war and the mass production of new technologies of perception produced countless new sensations. The rise of synthetic chemistry exposed the nose and tongue to artificial flavors and odors, constructing smell and taste as chemical senses, and challenging the relationship between external sensations and the formation of the subject. Amid the chemical disruption of the sensible, this dissertation takes smell and taste as modes of access and interpretation that move beyond the surface of representation, into the structures that shape the sensible. In the poisoning plots of Golden Age detective novels, smell and taste emerge as sensory clues through which the detective restores justice as well as the sensory order. Advertisements for Campbell’s soup and dessert puddings together with Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and the cookbooks of Julia Child and M. F. K. Fisher reveals the construction and disruption of corporate control over the sense of taste, which prioritizes efficiency over taste. The smell of disinfectants in the narratives of the third bubonic plague pandemic reveals the medical and racial structures of olfactory control that produce notions of twentieth century ‘deodorization.’ Reading Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937) with Mia McKenzie’s The Summer We Got Free (2013) reveals the how the literary evocation of smell and taste produces a sensory erotic that can reconstitute the sensible after the profound disruption of trauma. Smell and taste are sneaky senses: they resist both representation and isolation. Yet, in the indescribability of smell and taste lies their potential for understanding the subject’s relation to the world, and its construction as a sensory subject.
smell, taste, sensory aesthetics, detective fiction, food industry, olfactory modernity, structuralism, psychoanalysis, sensory erotics, interwar period
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