Sens et senteurs

The sense of smell is certainly less developed than sight or hearing, which allow us to orient ourselves primarily in space. This is why the social sciences have until now favored the study of other senses. It is certainly more difficult to verbalize an emotion based on a smell, but man is capable of smelling thousands of them and internalizing them with a strong emotional coloring: "olfactory speech" therefore allows man to express one's relationship to the world – adaptation or alienation – depending on one's communication situation. At the crossroads of literary and communicational approaches, the interdisciplinary works brought together in this work consist of deciphering a rhetoric of scents. Then, olfaction appears essential to the construction of meaning and finally proves to be an equivocal social marker.