CLIC is very delighted to welcome Anca Parvulescu as the 2024-25 Lorand Chair Intermediality. We warmly invite you to her inaugural lecture, 'Aschenbach’s Makeover: Physiognomic Faces in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice', on 13 March 2025 at 18:00 in Brussels. The exact location will be announced soon.
Synopsis
At the center of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice is a charged play of glances. The observer is Gustav Aschenbach, a German writer described as representative of “the European spirit.” For the duration of the short text, Aschenbach watches a young Polish boy named Tadzio. In particular, the boy’s face, a neoclassical form derived from Greek sculpture, captures Aschenbach’s attention. Mann’s novella refines its use of ekphrasis to produce a neoclassical modernist theory of the face, anchored in formal symmetry, with Tadzio’s face as a model of form. The text frames a complex dynamic of European insiders and outsiders, belonging and unbelonging, defined along lines of the face. At the climax of the narrative, however, Aschenbach undergoes a makeover. The scene, which can be read as a version of what the modernist poet, designer and artist Mina Loy described as “auto-facial-construction,” effectively turns Aschenbach, up to this point a masterful observer of faces, into a visual object himself. It redirects narrative authority away from Aschenbach’s physiognomic reading practices and towards creative strategies of facialization, makeup and cosmetic surgery.
Anca Parvulescu is the Liselotte Dieckmann Professor in Comparative Literature and professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Laughter: Notes on a Passion (2010); The Traffic in Women’s Work: East European Migration and the Making of Europe (2014); with Manuela Boatcă, Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (2022). Her current book project is Face and Form: Physiognomy in Literary Modernism (forthcoming in 2025 from Cambridge UP). Parvulescu is the PI for an EU-funded project on the history of comparatism.
