Face and Form

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-009-59979-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 206 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 457 g

Faces, faces, faces – faces everywhere! Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquity of the human face. Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and, later, Kobo 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 overinvestment 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Parvulescu, Anca

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. Aschenbach's makeover: physiognomic faces in death in Venice; 2. A personal style of face: proust and the physiognomy of women; 3. The biography of a face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando; 4. The face of a genius: Picasso, Stein, and the struggle with facial form; 5. Translated faces: Kobo Abe's the face of another; Coda: Instagram face; Bibliography.

Über Autor(innen)

Parvulescu, Anca
Anca Parvulescu is Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion (2010), The Traffic in Women's Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (2014), and, with Manuela Boatca, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (2022) – winner of the René Wellek Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literature, offered by the American Comparative Literature Association, and the Barrington Moore Award for Best Book in Comparative and Historical Sociology, offered by the American Sociological Association.