Face and Form : Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

Anca Parvulescu's prehistory of facial recognition technologies retells the story of literary modernism through the prism of the human face. She constructs an arc between twenty first-century conversations about the politics of the face and those physiognomic discourses that reflect modernism's long, complex and fascinating cultural history.

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, Kobo 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.