Cleaning the ‘Contamination’ of Smell

This article argues that the detailed descriptions of smell in Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover lay the groundwork for an embodied poetics based on olfactory perception, challenging the objectivity of human cognition. Reading the novel alongside Sontag’s doubts about the reliability of language in Against Interpretation and Illness as Metaphor , the article explores how metaphorical and binary thinking embedded in language distorts the direct perception of smell, revealing the possibility of restoring a sense of unmediated cognition. By reshaping the eighteenth-century philosophical experiment of Etienne Condillac’s statue in the novel, Sontag proposes a revaluation of embodied cognition to ‘cleanse’ the contamination of olfactory perception, ultimately developing it into an embodied poetics. 1

Criticism · Embodied cognition · Perception · Poetics · German Literature and Culture Studies · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Schopenhauer and Stefan Zweig

• The Smoke of London

  Open Access•William M Cavert•Smoke of London•2016

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