Figurements: A Symposium on Literature and the Face

This symposium will explore the various means by which literary texts represent the human face: its expressiveness, its cultural and semiotic significance, and its affects. The human face is often conceptualised in visual terms, and increasingly so in the context of intensifying regimes of facial surveillance, and digital reproduction and manipulation.

The symposium turns resolutely away from visual, technological or cinematic faces, to pay special attention to the history and meaning of rhetorical forms of face-writing in fiction, poetry, and to a lesser extent, in dramatic texts, principally in the traditions of European and Australian writing. Over three days we will attend to the singularity of the literary representation of the human face.

We will reflect on ways faces are represented in literary and popular writing, on challenging conceptual questions about humanity, animality and faciality, on the influence of generic and rhetorical patterns on the cognitive and emotional act of reading, and the way we understand individual and social identity formation in literature. One of the aims of this symposium is to learn how other scholars think about the literary representation of the human face.

Please also join us for the Symposium Keynote "Modernist Faces: On Marcel Proust's Facial Style" on Wednesday 27 November at 4:15pm.

This symposium is supported by the ARC Discovery Project, Literature and the Face.

Program

The full Symposium program can be downloaded here.

Location

The symposium will be held in Room 556, Level 5, Arts West - North Wing Building, and the Keynote - in the William Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts Building.

Enquiries

Please send your enquiries via figurementssymposium@gmail.com.

If you have any support requirements in order to participate fully, please contact us via scc-events@unimelb.edu.au.

Image credit: Self-portrait by Pauline Boty (1958), fragment.