A perdre haleine. Considérations interdisciplinaires sur l'odeur du baiser au XIXe siècle

“Un nez qui pense”. Le parfumeur en théoricien

International audience

De la baignoire au flacon : olfaction et masturbation féminine (1850-1914)

International audience

Touch, gender, and sexuality in Zola's La Curée

This paper addresses the issues of gender and sexuality in Zola's La Curée from a sensory studies perspective, focusing specifically on touch. The novel's atmosphere of softness is rooted in the Second Empire's obsession for luxurious comfort as well as "mollitia", an ethical and aesthethical concept inherited from Latin culture.

Foetor judaicus: antisemitism and the excremental imagination in late nineteenth-century French-speaking novels

This study examines the relationship between anti-Semitic discourse and excremental olfactory notations in French and Belgian fictional narratives during the second half of the nineteenth-century, including works from the Goncourt brothers, Rachilde, Léon Bloy, and Camille Lemonnier, among others. The novelists use nauseating olfactory notations, often linked to faecal matter, waste, digestion, etc., as clues of a character's ties with the Jewish community. The relationship between anti-Semitic ideology and excremental olfactory notations illustrates complex political, social, cultural, and economic tensions, directly influencing the ways in which literary texts conceive the discourses surr…

Symptomatic bodies: reading and writing the odor of sanctity in French culture (1868-1901)

Using examples from novels by the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Zola and Lemonnier, this paper explores the literary representation of the odor of sanctity in regard to the main epistemological discourses of the second half of the 19th century. In this deeply anticlerical intellectual context, the Christian myth of the odor of sanctity is analyzed by medical professionals and scientists as a pathological phenomenon. Although taking into account the divergent aesthetics of the selected authors, the study focuses mostly on the ambiguity literary texts maintain between the unspeakable experience of religious ecstasy and a symptomatic vision of the body.

Interprétation littéraire et sciences cognitives (ed. Françoise Lavocat, 2016)

Review of the collective volume Interprétation littéraire et sciences cognitives (ed. François Lavocat, Hermann, 2016).