Nose-gaping: The Smells of Mason & Dixon The Smells of Mason & Dixon
| Autor: | Michael H. Phillips |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: |
050101 languages & linguistics
Civilization Literature and Literary Theory Sense organ media_common.quotation_subject 05 social sciences Subject (philosophy) Enlightenment 06 humanities and the arts Art 060202 literary studies Carnivalesque Indeterminacy (literature) Aesthetics 0602 languages and literature 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Empiricism Liminality media_common |
| Zdroj: | Orbit: A Journal of American Literature. 7 |
| ISSN: | 2398-6786 |
| DOI: | 10.16995/orbit.768 |
| Popis: | This article examines Pynchon’s evocations of smell in Mason & Dixon as a vehicle for critiquing notions of the rational subject and the bounded text. The nose is posed as a carnivalesque counterpart to the eye, the sense organ most readily associated with empiricism. The directional gaze, crucial to the eponymous characters’ work as astronomer and surveyor, often gives way to enveloping odors, producing an embodiment inimical to Enlightenment. Anthropologist David Howes has argued that smell is most vividly experienced in liminal spaces or at cognitive thresholds. I draw on his work to illuminate Pynchon’s association of smells with the dissolution of distinctions between abstract categories like civilization/wilderness, mind/body, past/present, and text/reader. I argue that this novel about the delineation of a boundary is primarily concerned with interpretive indeterminacy, figured and produced through textual smells. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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