Participants:
Rebecca Halat (Minnesota)
Katie Jones (Nottingham)
Sarah McMahon (Arizona)
Andrew Ross (Michigan)
Jennifer Solheim (Michigan)
Jane Weston (Bristol)
This week, we discussed Chapter 9, 'La Puanteur du pauvre (trans: The Stench Of The Poor) of Alain Corbin's Le Miasme et la jonquille: l'odorat et l'imaginaire social, XVIIe-Xxe siècles (Paris: Flammeron, 1986). (Trans: The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the French social imagination.)
A summary in French of the work can be found here:
Le Miasme et la jonquille highlights the place of smell in social history, and its increased importance from 1750 in the wake of the Enlightenment conception of truth being derived through the senses, alongside acute anxiety over bodily invasion through the medium of smell. Courbin argues that from the Industrial Revolution, anxiety over risks of contamination from natural sources (excrement, etc.), evolved into preoccupations of social danger, with a fear of engulfment of the individual's 'aura' into the masses, fuelling a hygeine revolution, urban sanitisation drive and the increased potential for rigid social heirarchisation on the basis of body odour.
We explored the work as representative of the 'cultural' turn in historical studies, and how this turn inaugurated a new receptivity to literary sources for historical analysis, 19th century France being particularly rich for such material (Cf. the documentary ambitions of Balzac, Zola)..
This fed into a discussion of the links between literary analysis and historical analysis and the validity of their intersection for research purposes. We also discussed the relative merits of reading texts in the original version or in translation.
Potential further reading on the topic of smell was also cited:
David Barnes: The Great Stink of Paris And The Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Anne McClintock: Imperial Leather: Race, Gender And Sexual Identity In The Post-Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995).
The next meeting will take place on Tuesday April 7th from 5-7pm. Dr Chris Pearson from Bristol University will present his research on environmental history, with particular emphasis on his new project on the impact of dogs on the city of Paris.
Recommended pre-reading can be found at the following link:
Jane
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