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Full Description
Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquitousness of the human face. Its conflicting dynamics of legibility and opacity fascinated Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe, who framed their literary projects around the question of the face as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, difference and combinations thereof. Modernism - it could be argued - rewrote the face. In the present day, recent developments such as mask wearing during the pandemic and the use of facial recognition technology during the Black Lives Matter protests have forced us to reflect on the social impact of obscuring faces, while also raising concerns about about the visibility of certain faces and how this might be abused. This book builds an arc between these recent conversations about the politics of the face and those physiognomic discourses that reflect modernism's long, complex and fascinating cultural history. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Contents
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: Kōbō Abe's the face of another; Coda: Instagram face; Bibliography.
