Literature and Olfactory Modernity

Olfactory experience has been relatively marginalized in literary studies, and in Western aesthetics more broadly. Deodorization, as both a “civilizational” project and an ideology that stigmatizes people and communities on the basis of smell, is thus reflected in core values and methods of literary criticism such as critical distance, close attention to the play of language, and a historical orientation toward tasteful, bourgeois sensibilities. Yet many writers have critiqued the use of smell to reinforce distinctions of race, class, and gender. Literary engagements with smell range from 19th-century critiques of deodorizing discourses to genres—such as detective fiction and naturalism—that deploy smell to represent the unruly, subtle influences of modern urban environments; more recently, they include incisive critiques of smell as a tool of colonialism, environmental violence, cultural genocide, subaltern collective memory, queer intimacies, and speculative world-building.