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This article proposes the re-reading and comparison of some dozen works, some minor, others canonical, written between 1629 and 1887 and devoted in whole or in part to cheese viewed from the perspective of its bad smell as a paradoxical source of pleasure or, conversely, as disgusting. From Saint-Amant's Cantal to Zola's Belly of Paris, evocations of the experience of stink attest to not only a profound transformation, but also a remarkable reversibility, explained, in turn, by the history of olfactory sensitivity (Alain Corbin) and by modern thought on aesthetics. Indeed, the eighteenth century saw the immemorial habit of fetid odours and animal smells gradually replaced by the search for mild, plant-based fragrances. This lowering of thresholds of tolerance led to a weakening of offending odours, through dosing or mixing: one could risk a parallel with these pharmaka whose use and dilution alone determined their toxicity or safety. In the modern olfactory landscape, a similar constitutive ambivalence acquires a dimension we will term aesthetic for lack of a better word and which establishes the reversibility of taste and distaste or attraction and revulsion based on the object's concentration, as Baudelaire suggests in his essay On Wine and Hashish.
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To teach this 1890 novel, we use pages from Zola's Dossier préparatoire, "Tempérament" from the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, various critics of the novel, an article on codes in conflict in the novel, notes on descriptive theory, a few pictures linked to the novel, a sketch by C. Bertrand-Jennings, and two audio clips. Beside oral textual analyses, and oral presentations (handed in later written), we treat the illusion of the real, the novel's reversal of its quasi-scientific givens, and a new approach to reading description.
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