Anca Pârvulescu. Face and Form. Physiognomy in Literary Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025, 196 p.

Abstract

Anca Pârvulescu’s latest study takes on an ambitious stake: unveiling a “history of the present” through the lenses of what she calls the “modern faciality machine” (17) – the apparatus of subject production described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. The current obsession with technologies of the face (illustrated by the ubiquity of cosmetic adjustments, celebrity culture, “Instagram” faces or their equally commodified variants, facial recognition devices, or by the intensity of the debate over mask wearing by responsible citizens during the Covid pandemic, etc.) is invoked as the justification for a foray into the modernist effervescent, albeit ambivalent, reconfiguration of earlier regimes of faciality, itself drawing on the age-old identification of faces with texts to be deciphered.  The book’s anchorage in our collective enchantment with human faces sounds familiar but opportune alarm bells for analysts of modernity’s appetite for hyperconsumerist homogenization, mass surveillance and disinformation. Its substantive success, however, is ensured by the historicization of literary modernism’s efforts to both abolish mimetic modes and counteract the drive towards anonymization through minimalist tactics of physical representation that culminate in avant-gardist efforts of self-effacement, even if they remain unable to extricate themselves from the discursive assemblages of race, ethnicity, gender, or class.