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Common Scents: On Brecht's Revolution of the Senses
Modernity has often been understood as an age of “deodorization” where the dominance of sight (and, to a lesser degree, hearing) relegates the sense of smell to the very margins of human existence. Yet a distinct tradition of poets since 1800 has recovered olfaction in an act of poetic “reodorization.” Among these poets, this lecture will turn to Bertolt Brecht to show how he mobilized the odor of bodies, on the one hand, and the smell of the earth, on the other, for both political and poetological purposes (in particular his invectives against a poetry of “aromatic words”). Framed by texts by Walter Benjamin and the young Karl Marx, these scented poems point us to a veritable “revolution of the senses” that derives from and issues into a thought of the commonality, that is, the radically shared character of all air.
About the Speaker
Jonas Rosenbrück is Assistant Professor of German at Amherst College. He is currently completing his first book, titled Common Scents: Poetry, Modernity, and a Revolution of the Senses, which traces the various poetological functions of smell and its erasure in the modern age through Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Ponge. His work has been published in Comparative Literature, CR: The New Centennial Review, and The Germanic Review, among other venues. He recently began work on a new project titled Toward a Critique of Geschlecht: Masculinity, Generation, and Germanophone Literatures After Fascism, which investigates the racialized and gendered formations of post-war Germany’s body politic. Prior to coming to Amherst, Professor Rosenbrück worked with Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program as Director of Volunteer Development.
