Guess What Readers?
One day Lit class was cancelled because of miscommunication, so Prof. C invited the class to attend his colleague's lecture called "The Face in Pain: Suffering, Witnessing, Sympathy" by Charlie Veric ( who has/is completing a Ph.D. in [Asian] American Studies in one of the Ivy Leagues in the U.S., maybe Yale ).
It caught my attention kasi in the Philippines ( and perhaps other Asian countries ), the concept of "Face" (hiya?) is pervasive ( beyond the biological/physiological, can also be the literal focus of aesthetics etc. ). I think in a way (subconscious or not) his inspiration may have stemmed from this. We came in late but in general he talked about the discourse of "Face."
He analyzed a facial twitching of a character in a literary text ( maybe dealing with genocide in Cambodia ), gave a biological explanation, a sociologist's insight, and a French Philosopher's input revealing that the face exceeded biological functions. In a face, ethics ( Aristotle's character ) are made visible; thus face is performative preventing assumption of biological determinism.
He then explored perception, where face had nothing to do with what we see, but rather, it dealt with the politics of sympathy ( Aristotle's pathos ). He continued with a parallel of Picasso's cubist painting of "Guernica" and connected it to the ceremonial/contractual act that bound viewers into the suffering of others. He concluded with camera as a realist mode, Darwin's other book about Face, expression, and emotion ( that differentiated humans from animals ), and how face is both a matter of impression management and a medium of expression. (wow!)
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