The New Physiognomy: Face, Form, and Modern Expression (Hopkins Studies in Modernism) - Softcover

Rives, Rochelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1421448386 ISBN 13: 9781421448381

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024

Synopsis

A fascinating new study of the face, form, and history of expression.

Advances in facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and other technologies provoke urgent ethical questions about facial expressivity and how we interpret it. In The New Physiognomy, Rochelle Rives roots contemporary facial dilemmas in a more expansive timeline of modernist engagements with the face to argue that facial ambiguity is essential to how we value other people.

Beginning with nineteenth-century caricatures of Oscar Wilde's face, Rives reasons that modernist modes of reading the face perceived it as a manifestation of both biologically determined traits and scripted forms of personality. Considering faces such as sculptures of great poets, portraits of facially wounded World War I soldiers, W. H. Auden's aging face, and Cindy Sherman's recent photographic self-portraits, Rives reframes how to read modernist works by Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Joseph Conrad, Mina Loy, Henry Tonks, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

About this title

About the Author

Rochelle Rives (NEW YORK, NY) is a professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is the author of Modernist Impersonalities: Affect, Authority, and the Subject.

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1421448386
• ISBN 13: 9781421448381
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264