Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism
By Anca Parvulescu
Cambridge UP, 2025
ISBN: 9781009599801 Open Access ebook
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/face-and-form/3C155E6711CD5D399C1F20B7DE1B2D24
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.
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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.
“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
Anca Pârvulescu is a scholar of comparative literature specializing in global modernism, literary and critical theory, literary comparatist, migration studies, and East Europe. She is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of English at the Washington University in St. Louis. Her books include Laughter: Notes on a Passion (MIT P, 2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (U of Chicago P, 2014); and with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (Cornell UP, 2022).
