Literature and the Face: A Critical History

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...

We're excited to launch a new digital exhibit as part of Literature and the Face. In 2021 we collaborated with two PhD candidates in the Faculty of Arts to build a digital exhibition titled Bittersweet: A Cultural History of the Smile. In the University of Melbourne Digital Studio Internships Progra...

In this first of our guest blog posts for Literature & the Face we welcome the following discussion of the smile in children's literature by Catherine Gay. Catherine is a PhD Candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is also a Digital Studio...

Reflecting on cinema’s love of the close-up, in 1924 the Hungarian film critic and poet Béla Balázs observed:  ‘In close-ups every wrinkle becomes a crucial element of character and every twitch of a muscle testifies to a pathos that signals great inner events.’  When we think of close-ups of the hu...

Early in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925), readers encounter the strange, disembodied gaze of the fictional oculist Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, looking out over the ‘grey land and spasms of bleak dust’ of West Egg, a town modelled on Great Neck in Long Island, New York.   Peeri...

One of the key aspects of our project is the study of the silent discourse of the face: the way literary texts characterise the face as communicating a message or a feeling to others. Our shorthand phrase for this is the "as if to say….” trope. Sometimes faces “speak” in complex sentences; at others...

In the song “Happiness”, from her 2020 release Evermore, Taylor Swift articulates the break-down of a relationship. She asks a bitter rhetorical question: Tell me, when did your winning smileBegin to look like a smirk?  In one of those uncanny moments when popular culture addresses our historical re...

Our project team member, Professor Guillemette Bolens, has recently published a new book with Oxford University Press -  Kinesic Humor: Literature, Embodied Cognition, and the Dynamics of Gesture. The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change...

Tyne recently published an article in the University of Melbourne's Pursuit. It discusses some of our broad project concepts and aims. You can read it here! Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the ‘Mona Lisa’ in Paris’ Louvre Museum. Picture: Getty Images

Stephanie and Tyne recently spoke on a panel in a new series by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) at the University of Melbourne entitled ‘Technology and the world around us.’ Alongside Dr Vanessa Bartlett and Dr Marc Cheong, we explored the theme of Art, Literature &...

Welcome to the blog of Literature and the Face: A Critical History! We are a research team based at the University of Melbourne and the University of Geneva.   Our project aims to chart and analyse the representation of the human face in literary texts from the medieval to the contemporary era. It e...