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Face and Form
Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues that modernism was obsessed with the ubiquitousness 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. A proxy for form, memory, intermediality or difference—and combinations thereof—modernism rewrote the face. The old pseudo-science of physiognomy, which posited faces as sites of legible meaning, was in the process reconfigured, but not entirely surpassed. The face in modernist literature lost its connection to interiority, but remained a surface for reading and interpretation. As such, the face also became a canvas for creative appropriations, what Mina Loy called “auto-facial-construction.” Parvulescu is currently co-editing a special issue of Journal of World Literature on the face in global modernism.