Category Archives: emotion

Face, Form and Modern Fictions

art, Blog, CFP, emotion, Facial-recognition technology, Literature, , ,

We’re delighted to see that Dr. Rochelle Rivers will be editing a forthcoming special issue for Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory on ‘Face, Form and Modern Fictions’. The issue not only reflects a growing interest in understanding the position of the face within, around and against early-twentieth century modernisms, but promises to expand the incredible work Rivers has already done in the field with her 2024 study, The New Physiognomy Face, Form, and Modern Expression. Those interested should consider submitting a manuscript by April 15th. More information can be found in the Call For Papers here (copied below).

Call for Papers

This special issue will examine the role of the face in modern fictions. With the idea of “fiction” broadly construed, this issue seeks essays that examine some aspect of the evolution of the face in modern literary and visual culture and its relation to what Marion Zillo has called the “technics that exteriorize it,” literature being one of them. For example, in work by modernists like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Mina Loy, prosopopoiea, the lyrical act of face-making, allowed for the fictionalizing of subjects and the exploration of radical modes of identity and relation. Influenced by the nineteenth-century “science” of physiognomy, early twentieth-century writers such as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Nella Larsen, and Djuna Barnes explicitly linked the face and its claims to reveal the “truth” of a subject to the writing and reading of fictions. At the same time that texts by these authors engaged in the production of faces, they also employed narrative strategies of defacement to represent inner life, often in an effort to avoid objectifying racialized, disabled, or queer subject positions.

Essays in this collection might consider the broader frame, antecedents for, and/ or contemporary aspects of such a literary interest in faces. More specifically, what changes in the subject, person, or personality are suggested by the changing literary form of the face and the techniques of its production? How do faces, or conversely, the absence of faces, function in the writing and production of novel literary forms, both modernist and contemporary? What are the political and ethical stakes of these operations? Finally, how might we connect the different media involved in visualizing the face–painting, digital, or in film, for example–to its construction in literature? For critics like Jenny Edkins, a contradiction attends our consciousness of face: between its potential disappearance into “a world of digital images and the post-human” and our simultaneous sense of its “endur[ance] as an emblem of political personhood.” For Edkins, the “face is a politics” produced by specific political systems that see it as a “necessity.”  In an era in which  artificial intelligence, medical masks, digital image production, filtering aps and interventions like Botox shape the way we see other faces, what can literary faces tell us about the potential agency of the face in our current moment and beyond?

Essays may explore the following genres and topics, although this list is not exhaustive: 

  • Literature from a variety of genres, including:
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
    • Satire
    • Periodicals
    • Essays
    • Drama
  • Visual culture (i.e. caricatures, cartoons, illustrations, film, photography)
  • Digital culture (digital image production, screens, zoom)
  • Artificial Intelligence (surveillance, Facial Recognition Technology, privacy)
  • Modernism
  • Physiognomy and its History, in particular, facial typologies
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Genre Studies
  • Periodization 
  • Form and Formal Techniques (such as the close-up and the portrait)
  • Race and Racialization
  • Plastic Surgery and Facial Reconstruction
  • History of Science and Medicine
  • Disability Studies
  • Faciality in Queer and Trans-Studies

Dr. Rochelle Rives, BMCC-CUNY
rrives@bmcc.cuny.edu

Lost Modernists & The Face

art, Blog, collaboration, emotion, Literature, Modernism, poetry,

Literature & the Face: A Critical History has recently teamed up with the Lost Modernists research network to publish a volume of essays on lost modernists, faciality and literature.

With an Introduction by Tyne Daile Sumner, the volume features a range of global essays on gender, portraiture, phenomenology and faces, the ‘dead face,’ and modernist poetry. Including:

‘Look at the wretch’s face!: Considering the Face in Rashid Jahan’s ‘Woh” by Anna Learn

‘Facing War: Kati Horna’s Portraiture Experiments and the Spanish Civil War’ by Laura Hartmann-Villalta

‘Nose Perception in Modernist Writing: What’s That Between Your Eyes?’ by Ryan O’Shea

‘The Dead Face: A process of haunted recognition in May Sinclair’ by Guy Webster

And ‘Parts of a Body’s Head: Laura Riding Jackson’s Fragmentation of Face’ by Tyne Daile Sumner.

We’re thrilled to share this exciting collaboration with the Lost Modernists network and their group of dedicated scholars and editors!

CFP: The Face and/in World Literature

ACLA, art, Blog, CFP, collaboration, conference, emotion, seminar, , , ,

Together with Professor Anca Parvulescu from Washington University in St. Louis, we are delighted to put together a co-hosted seminar proposal for next year’s American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference.

We currently seek paper proposals for a seminar on ‘The Face and/in World Literature.’

Beginning October 1 (and due October 31) interested individuals may submit a paper proposal to ONE seminar of their choice. Potential seminar organizers will then have the opportunity to select the papers they would like to include in their seminar and submit a complete seminar to the ACLA for approval.

Please see the ACLA call page here to submit a paper proposal. We look forward to hearing from you!

Our proposed seminar brings together scholars working in a range of fields to frame a comparative literary history of the face. From Chaucer through to the contemporary global novel, the seminar considers changing literary and textual discourses about the human face alongside the cultural history of face reading. Working across literary geographies, genres and historical periods, papers and conversations will consider a range of imaginative representations of the face and the conventions that frame such representations. Adjacent fields through which an analysis of the face might be engaged include philosophy, sociology, linguistics, cultural theory, art history, and the history of science. The seminar aims to illuminate the relationship between literature and the long history of social and cultural understandings of the face and allow us to better understand contemporary transformations at the intersection of physiognomy, affect, and, increasingly, technology. We hope this history will offer new perspectives on recent developments in facial recognition surveillance and affect detection technologies, social media practices, and the way in which we increasingly use the face as a social commodity.

Possible topics include:

–literary histories of prosopopoeia

–the portrait and its conventions

–histories of the mask and the veil

–emotion/affect and the face

–physiognomy around the world

–race and the face

–disability and the face

–technologies of facialization 

–theories of interface

–aesthetics and/of the face

–formalisms of the face

–the history of cosmetics and cosmetic surgery

–the face in digital cultures 

–ethics of the face

–comparatism and the face

Disturbed Faces: Conference Program

CFP, conference, emotion, Geneva, Literature, poetry, Uncategorized, , , ,

We now have a flyer and program for our forthcoming conference: Disturbed Faces (Visages perturbés / Verstörte Gesichter).

Disturbed Faces will be hosted by the literature program at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature.

When: 3rd-5th November, 2022 at the University of Geneva

The conference program can be found here!

New publications!

Blog, cognitive poetics, emotion, Geneva, gesture, kinesic, Literature

Our collaborator Professor Guillemette Bolens at the University of Geneva has some fantastic new publications out in fields relating to Literature & the Face. Details and links to online access below!

G. Bolens, “Kinesic intelligence, medieval illuminated psalters, and the poetics of the psalms.” Studia Neophilologica, 2022, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00393274.2022.2051733

G. Bolens, “Inventive embodiment and sensorial imagination in medieval drawings: The marginalia of the Walters Book of Hours MS W.102.” Cogent Arts & Humanities 9 (1), 2022, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2022.2065763

G. Bolens, “Embodied cognition, kinaesthetic knowledge, and kinesic imagination in visual arts and literature.” Frontiers in Communication. Sec. Multimodality of Communication, 2022, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.926232

G. Bolens, “The sense of movement in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur and the Alliterative Morte Arthure.” English Studies, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2022.2098664

Modernist Literature & the Face: CFP

art, Blog, CFP, cognitive poetics, emotion, Literature, Modernism, poetry

We’re excited to launch a new Blog Cluster on Modernist Literature & the Face with the cross-institutional Lost Modernists network. 

Lost Modernists is a hub for all-things related to literary modernism, including neglected or lost modernist writers and those part of the Lost Generation. Their content spans rare books, interviews with eminent scholars, authorial profiles, peer-reviewed blog clusters, and more.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound, 1914

We’re seeking contributions in the form of interviews, short reflections and scholarly essays that consider the representation of the face in modernist literature.

Possible topics might include:

  • facial expression and identity in modernist literary texts
  • the ‘unreadable’ or ambivalent gaze of modernism 
  • interpreting faces in daily life
  • loss of face, impersonality and ennui 
  • imagism and the face in modernist poetry
  • stream of consciousness and the face in the modern novel

More details on the CFP here.

 

Auto-Facial-Construction

emotion, gesture, Literature, poetry, , , ,

We have launched a new monthly ‘Reading Hour’ for Literature and the Face. Sessions will be held in-person at the University of Melbourne on Tuesday afternoons. We welcome Graduate Researchers and staff from across the university who are interested in topics relating to our project such as faciality, emotions, portraiture, facial-recognition technologies and more.

In our first session in April we examined Mina Loy’s Auto-Facial-Construction (1919), an advertising pamphlet Loy produced that outlines a range of exercises and instructions for achieving what she termed ‘facial integrity.’ For Loy, the ability to communicate one’s true personality to others requires a physical restructuring of the face that harmonises outside appearance with an inner subjectivity, aimed at achieving the ‘fitting esthetic revelation in our faces.’ She stages the unity of self and face through a process of self-fashioning that revives our ‘inherent right … to look like ourselves.’

You can read Auto-Facial-Construction online in this wonderful edition in the Yale
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Christina Walter’s essay in the Modernist Commons, “Feminist Manifesto” and Auto-Facial-Construction, provides an excellent background to the pamphlet.

On May 10th we will meet again to read the next text in our series: Georg Simmel’s 1901 essay, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face.” To join us in person please contact Tyne Sumner at tdsumner@unimelb.edu.au

The Time of the Smile

cognitive poetics, conference, emotion, Literature, smile, ,

We will be speaking about our project at the forthcoming conference of The Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. This year’s conference theme is ‘Reception and Emotion’ and the event will be held online via Zoom (hosted by The University of Western Australia), from 27–30 June 2022!

Our proposed panel will consider the following, across three papers by Stephanie, Joe & Tyne:

In The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris (2014), Colin Jones argued that in the eighteenth century a new kind of smile, the “white-toothed smile” came to replace a “snooty, aggressive, closed-mouth smile” that had been dominant in seventeenth century France. This revolution, he shows, was tied to transformations in the history of emotions, in dentistry, in practices of aesthetic representation, and in the progressive urbanisation of eighteenth-century life. Our panel takes inspiration from Jones’s conjugation of the emotional, the physiological and the socio-historical in the sense of a smile, but we want to expand this field of inquiry. We want to look at other times of the smile: earlier periods in the history of the smile and other times in the arc of the smile (the first movements of a smile, the experience of smiling and being smiled at, of smiling to oneself and to another). The three papers on this panel span medieval and early modern texts, practices of close reading, cultural history and digital methods, in order to deepen the cultural history of the smile. 

‘Adorable World!’: From Face to Story in Virginia Woolf’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’

art, emotion, gesture, kinesic, Literature

In our forthcoming paper at the University of Melbourne, we will be speaking about a chapter-in-progress on the face in Virginia Woolf’s ‘An Unwritten Novel’.

The history of the face in literature can be told from many different angles, and from many different starting points. We begin our history with a moment that, in one sense, is arbitrary: a relatively unknown short story by Virginia Woolf recommended to us by our colleague Ken Gelder. ‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1921) is oriented around a single moment of covert face reading that takes place in that classic site of modern public and social life: the train carriage. The narrator of the story starts to spin a narrative around the face of a stranger in the carriage that sets in motion a meta reflection on the problem of writing and the conventions of the realist novel. Instead of generating a novel—with its quotidian detail, familiar class and family dynamics, and its drive towards closure—her observations settle instead on the phenomenon of thought itself and on how one would have to write in order to capture the thoughts which flutter across a face. The ‘turn’ of the short story, then, becomes paradoxically a turn away from narrative. Our paper considers how the face in Woolf’s story poses problems for narrative representation that lead to a different kind of novel and a different kind of literary history.  

You can read the story here!

CFP: Disturbed Faces

conference, emotion, Geneva, gesture, kinesic, Literature

We’re thrilled to announce the Call For Papers for our trilingual collaborative conference – Disturbed Faces (Visages perturbés / Verstörte Gesichter).

Disturbed Faces will be hosted by the literature program at the University of Geneva and the Swiss Association of General and Comparative Literature.

When: 3rd-5th November, 2022 at the University of Geneva

Call for Papers

The human face is a part of the body as well as a sensorimotor process and an intersubjective and social phenomenon. A bodily place, it is located at the level of the head, but it often manifests the emotional and expressive state of the body as a whole. Sensorimotor process, it causes sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and kinaesthesia, and this reciprocally: we perceive and we are perceived through our face. It establishes self-awareness as a subject capable of entering into relationship with other living beings. The face attracts our attention at all times, but especially when a health crisis forces us to rethink our way of communicating – masked, from a distance or by interposed screens. 

In literature and the visual arts, the face can be the central element in the construction of characters. The physical aspect, the expressiveness and the modifications of the face manifest emotions and thoughts. The face thus positions the characters in their relationship to others and defines their role and function in the plot. Finally, it allows and establishes the possibility of identification with the characters during the reception. So what happens when this preeminent role is disrupted? How is a disturbed face constructed, represented or thought out and how can it be put into perspective with other forms of relation to the face? What role and what impact does it have on the construction of the characters, on their relationships and on the plot in literary works and the visual arts (comics, cinema, installations)? 

The annual ASLGC colloquium – which will be held from 03 to 05 November 2022 at the University of Geneva in collaboration with the international research project Literature and the Face: A Critical History (Australian Research Council) – aims to explore the representations and constructions of the ‘disturbed face’ in literatures around the world, favoring an approach that is both interdisciplinary and intersemiotic. It thus seeks to bring together literary study, the visual arts and other disciplines in which the face plays an epistemological role (philosophy, sociology, medicine, law), starting from the principle that the face is never given as it is and that it is always constructed in a discursive as well as a semiotic way in the broad sense, in a cognitive and emotional way as well as in a cultural and social way.

Organizing committee

Prof. ass. Evelyn Dueck
Prof. Guillemette Bolens
Prof. Martin Rueff

Terms of participation

The research presented must not have been the subject of a previous publication or communication. Interventions can be given in French, English, Italian or German. The communication proposal (the submission of a one-page summary and a short biography) must reach the organizing committee before January 31, 2022 at the following addresses: 

evelyn.dueck@unige.ch and guillemette.bolens@unige.ch