Ambiguity of Textual Portraiture in Realism and Modernism

This article will seek to prove that literary representations of the face are effective in several ways. It will propose that the realist approach to textual portraiture (Leo Tolstoy) foregrounds the interactive role of the face and emphasizes both its spontaneous self-expression and deliberate self-creation; thus, in the semiotic sense, the face reveals and conceals simultaneously. Modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz) still employ the face as an instrument of characterization but simultaneously utilize its familiar image on the level of form, as a meta-commentary or a stylistic device. In consequence, in modernism the ambiguity of its portraiture arises in both the content and form of the text, while in realism, only on the level of content. The article identifies and compares selected literary strategies that generate these ambiguities.