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spacestationtrustfund's review
3.0
Clearly I do not know enough about American culture to understand many of the references in this book. Anyway, read The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino, published in The New Yorker. It'll fuck you up.
lauren_endnotes's review
"The history of literature and art is littered not just with 'The Ideal Face' but also with stranger faces... the essays in this book take up a range of recalcitrant and unruly faces : the disabled face, the racially ambiguous face, the dead face, the faces we see in objects, the animal face, the blank face, and the digital face."
From the Introduction essay of STRANGER FACES by Namwali Serpell, 2020.
Lapping up the literary criticism, semiotics, aesthetics, & film theory in this essay collection! What a delight!
Serpell constructs 5 essays around the concept of 'the face'.
▫️"Elephant in Rooms" - Joseph Merrick, 'the Elephant Man' - discourse on representations of Cleopatra, and the transformation of Michael Jackson
▫️"Two-Faced" - the narrative & provenance of 'The Bondswoman's Narrative', the manuscript by an enslaved woman from the 1850s. Discussion of passing, and the authenticity of the work.
▫️"Mop Head" - Hitchcock doppelgängers in 1960's Psycho. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, the shower scene, and the anthropomorphism of objects in film classic.
▫️"Bear Head" - Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man" documentary about the life & death of Timothy Treadwell. Animal faces, death, blankness, "extreme sublime" in film.
▫️"E-Faced"
From the Introduction essay of STRANGER FACES by Namwali Serpell, 2020.
Lapping up the literary criticism, semiotics, aesthetics, & film theory in this essay collection! What a delight!
Serpell constructs 5 essays around the concept of 'the face'.
▫️"Elephant in Rooms" - Joseph Merrick, 'the Elephant Man' - discourse on representations of Cleopatra, and the transformation of Michael Jackson
▫️"Two-Faced" - the narrative & provenance of 'The Bondswoman's Narrative', the manuscript by an enslaved woman from the 1850s. Discussion of passing, and the authenticity of the work.
▫️"Mop Head" - Hitchcock doppelgängers in 1960's Psycho. Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, the shower scene, and the anthropomorphism of objects in film classic.
▫️"Bear Head" - Werner Herzog's 2005 "Grizzly Man" documentary about the life & death of Timothy Treadwell. Animal faces, death, blankness, "extreme sublime" in film.
▫️"E-Faced"
harrystyleslovebot's review
2.0
id give it 2.5/5 stars. some parts were interesting but the essays seemed to be repetitive. good at first but towards the ends i started to skim the pages.
medievaljuliana's review
4.0
First book to get me out of my reading slump, I read it in two days and it was a great change of pace. I love the "face" as framework/topic/question, and my favorite essay was "Bear Head."
wanderinggnome's review
3.0
60% of this went straight over my head but I liked the bits I understood. Particularly appreciated the chapter on Grizzly Man and anthropomorphic faces.