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.
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'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
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Anca Parvulescu's prehistory of facial recognition technologies retells the story of literary modernism through the prism of the human face.
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: Kb
Abe's the face of another; Coda: Instagram face; Bibliography.
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 Boatc, 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.
