Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face, argues Anca Parvulescu in Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe framed their literary projects around the question of the face, its dynamic of legibility and opacity.
In literary modernism, the face functioned as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality or difference – and combinations thereof. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which assumed faces to be sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured. Modernist faces lost their connection to interiority but remained surfaces of reading and interpretation. As such, they also became canvases for creative appropriation, what Mina Loy called auto-facial-construction.
The modernist over-investment in faces functions as a warning against the return of physiognomy in contemporary technologies of facial recognition.
This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Reviews
“Face and Form reassesses the centrality of physiognomy in the modernist perception to ask what we can learn from it today. This book is a remarkable contribution to modernist studies, and a timely response to the ongoing debates on facial recognition technologies and the politics of COVID-19.”
— Katja Haustein, lecturer in comparative literature, University of Kent
“Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism is an engaging, lucidly written account of the face as the site of a modernist struggle over form. Parvulescu offers brilliant re-readings of canonical modernist texts that focus on ‘modernist faciality’ in light of their well-known experiments with character and literary form.”
— Rochelle Rives, professor of English, City University of New York
About the author
Anca Parvulescu is professor of English and the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature, both in Arts & Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis.