This panel exploring the face in global literature includes scholars offering a diversity of voices across various spectrums: rank, geographic location, institution type, language, ethnicity, and gender. We especially feel it important to highlight the often-marginalized voices of contingent faculty and those working in languages other than English. Speakers will be limited to 12 minutes of presentation time each, reserving at least 15 minutes for required open-ended discussion.
We will begin with two papers on Spanish-language and bilingual writers that examine the face in gendered contexts. Pamela Lim-McAlister’s paper on Emilia Pardo Bazán’s “El encaje roto” (“Torn Lace”) provides a close reading and analysis of how the Spanish writer plays with a myriad of meanings, sayings, and usages of “face” and “facelessness,” such as accepting things at face value, putting on a happy face, or having two faces. Lim-McAlister examines this multifaceted linguistic play in the context of Pardo Bazán’s feminist exploration of women's experiences in a patriarchal society. PhD student Oscar Garcia examines Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography Hunger of Memory as it tells of the author’s assimilation from a Mexican-American household into the American public sphere. In the prologue, Rodriguez turns to face a previous version of himself that he has sought to overcome: “I turn to the boy I once was in order, finally, to describe the man I am now. I remember what was so grievously lost to define what was necessarily gained” (5). The capacity of one’s own face to resemble another version of the self and yet express an otherness comes into play as Garcia considers how the Chicano politics of masculinity and manhood are engaged in the physical and psychic violence of twentieth-century U.S. nation building and imperial authority.
The final two papers approach the face in English-language works by British, Haitian-American, and Irish writers. Elizabeth Weixel engages with two monstrous literary faces—the Creature’s in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the titular torturer’s in Edwidge Danticat’s The Dew Breaker—to explore how faces can facilitate increasingly complex learning in an introductory literature classroom, leading students from close reading to critical theories of disability, race, and history (e.g., the history of science and criminality, or the Duvalier regime and Haitian diaspora). As both expressive and sympathetic, and repulsive and othered, these faces prompt an examination of human monstrosity in global and historical contexts that provokes critical self-examination in students as well. Umar Shehzad’s paper traces the intertextual relationship between Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso’s influential book The Criminal Man (1876) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Lombroso’s biological theory of criminology problematically suggested that criminality is inherited and that it can be read off the facial features. Joyce was introduced to Lombroso’s work during his stay in Italy while he was working on Ulysses. Crime figures prominently in the episode titled “Eumaeus” where the novel’s protagonists, Bloom and Stephen, visit the Cabman’s shelter. The faces of the real and the tattooed figures come under deep scrutiny of the narrator who looks to decipher the murder mysteries through physiognomically inflected reading of the faces. The paper will note how the novel draws upon as well as critiques the assumptions of criminal anthropology of its time.
Taken together, these papers demonstrate the virtuosity of the face as a topic in literary studies and in multiple contexts of interest to the MLA’s membership: cultural and literary studies, the teaching of literature, global and comparative literature, and emerging critical approaches.