Language:
English
Year of publication:
2016
Titel der Quelle:
Interpreting Primo Levi
Angaben zur Quelle:
(2016) 115-127
Keywords:
Levi, Primo, Criticism and interpretation
;
Holocaust survivors' writings History and criticism
;
Italian fiction Jewish authors
;
History and criticism
;
Smell in literature
;
Smell Psychological aspects
;
Memory in literature
Abstract:
Smell is a primary and primitive sense; it is our “chemical” sense, as the French geographer Jean-François Staszak states.1 The sense of smell begins with the contact between a molecule and a cell. The stimulus (a set of odorant molecules) is processed by the brain together with other information, both contextual (visual, tactile, and olfactory) and emotional.2 The brain, as the anthropologist Joël Candau explains, identifies, names and categorizes these pieces of information, creating an olfactory image.3 In this complex process, the data that an individual has stored during a lifetime produces olfactory traces. The social and cultural environment and the biography of the individual determine what these traces are. At the end of this “operation,” according to Candau, the stimulus “is codified in the long-term memory in the form of a new olfactory trace.”4 Therefore, individuals carry their own personal, subjective, and intimate olfactory cultures and memories. Two different persons can smell the same odor, but each one memorizes and collects different traces.
DOI:
10.1057/9781137435576_9
URL:
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