Chem. Senses 29: 459-461,
2004
Chemical Senses Vol. 29 No. 5 © Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved
LETTER TO THE EDITOR |
Proust Reinterpreted: Can Proust’s Account of Odour-cued Autobiographical Memory Recall Really be Investigated? A Reply to Jellinek
School of Psychology, The University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK
Correspondence should be sent to: Simon Chu, School of Psychology, The University of Liverpool, Eleanor Rathbone Building, Bedford Street South, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK. e-mail: chu@liverpool.ac.uk
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Odours have long been believed to evoke particularly powerful autobiographical memories, an effect that has been labelled the ‘Proust phenomenon’. The phenomenon is so named because of the well-known literary anecdote reported by Proust (1913
) at the beginning of his novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, wherein his autobiographical memory is productively stimulated by an olfactory experience. Jellinek has recently contributed an insightful and scholarly analysis of the relevant passages from Proust’s writings with reinterpretations and improvements in the translation that, although subtle, convey a greater sense of the evocative and powerful experience that Proust reported.
Our paper reviewing the empirical research on odour-evoked autobiographical memories (Chu and Downes, 2000a) addressed the different approaches that previous investigators have taken in examining the question of whether memories cued by odours are qualitatively different to those cued by other-modality stimuli. In doing so, we highlighted the methodological errors