Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism

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ID: 288019
2025
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Ranked #192 of 1,244 articles by views in ADVANCES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE

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Abstract
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, 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 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.
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persistent_1761420146_68fd237258e3a Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Anca Parvulescu
Journal ADVANCES IN ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRACTICE
Year 2025
DOI
10.1017/9781009599801
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