Mediality of Smells
Description:... "'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"--
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