Practical
Thursday, 13 March, 2025
- 18:00 until 20:00
Free of charge
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.
About the Emile Lorand Chair
Dr. Emile Lorand (1931-2005) from Ixelles left his estate to Vrije Universiteit Brussel upon his death. In his will, he specifically stated that the bequest should be used for the benefit of the 'Department of Romance Philology' at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.
The Emile Lorand Chairs are used to invite specialists from international universities to teach Italian, Spanish, and French language and literature, as well as intermediality, at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. While their research topics and methodologies may differ, they consistently contribute to enriching the academic programs in the language and literature disciplines.
In addition to the 'Cattedra Emile Lorand di linguistica e Letteratura italiana,' the 'Cátedra Emile Lorand: lingüística española y estudios literarios,' the 'Chaire Emile Lorand en littérature française,' and the 'Emile Lorand Chair in Intermedial Studies,' an annual Emile Lorand Prize is also awarded for the best master’s thesis in Romance languages (French, Italian, and Spanish) in both literature and linguistics.
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