Graduate Student, English
PhD Student
Thesis Title: The Smell of Modernism
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Dr Fiona Becket
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About
BA Hons English Literature (First Class), Peterhouse, Cambridge University
The aim of my research is to investigate the significance of smell within modernism, examining the role of odour as both historical artefact and literary metaphor in the construction of what we perceive as modernism.
A key preliminary question is whether there is anything idiosyncratically modernist about the treatment of smell in the period 1900-1930. My initial survey indicates a perceptible shift in the presentation of odour within Victorian, ‘realist’ literature, to its use as a textual strategy in modernist literature, a development which I believe represents a neglected area of scholarship.
I hope to frame this shift by examining modernist philosophical interpretations of the nature of language. My studies of Wittgenstein and Heidegger indicate that smell is marginalised in their discussions of the senses which generate our sense of ontogenesis. Smell’s limited presence within the language of philosophy in favour of the visual and auditory is suggestive; I want to examine the consequences of this position when smell is exploited deliberately within literary texts, when it is, I believe, always already encoded as an unstable means of representation.
