Looking at Faces

Abstract

Abstract This chapter opens up an inquiry into the changing and conflicted representations of the sensory and perceptual act of ‘looking’ in literary texts in the context of the human face. The face is often seen as signifying humanity; nevertheless, individual faces are inevitably perceived through deeply historicized and culturally specific frameworks, and literary texts involve the reader in the process of reading faces according to changing cognitive, perceptual, and rhetorical conventions. Such changes can be profitably compared and contrasted across different historical periods and cultural contexts. The chapter’s conceptual starting point is the ambiguity between acts of perception (‘looking’) and acts of appearance (‘look’). It subsequently explores the different ways faces can ‘look’ in the medieval discourse of courtly love, early modern and modern understandings of how a courtier should appear in public, and a contemporary representation of the interface between human, animal, and spirit faces in Australian Indigenous literature.