New Physiognomy

<p><b>A fascinating new study of the face form and history of expression.</b></p><p>Advances in facial recognition artificial intelligence and other technologies provoke urgent ethical questions about facial expressivity and how we interpret it. In <i>The New Physiognomy </i>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.</p><p>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.</p>