Modernism was obsessed with the ubiquitousness of the human face. Its conflicting dynamics of legibility and opacity fascinated Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and, later, Kōbō Abe, who framed their literary projects around the question of the face as a proxy for form, memory, intermediality, difference and combinations thereof. Modernism – it could be argued – rewrote the face. In the present day, recent developments such as mask wearing during the pandemic and the use of facial recognition technology during the Black Lives Matter protests have forced us to...