Introduction: The Terms of the Question

Abstract

The ancient Greek word for mask — prosopon — was the normal word for face or appearance or countenance, especially with emphasis on the features and the eyes: the prosopon revealed the identity of an individual in his or her relation to others. In her introduction to Colin Teevan’s translation of Euripedes’s Bacchai, Edith Hall insists that the word had none of the modern connotations of ‘concealment or dissimulation’ but indicated the representation of relations.

Because English is the international language of modernisation, the mask is also the modern world.

— T.J. Cribb¹

Not despite the kitsch to which it is drawn is Mahler’s music great, but because its construction unties the tongue of kitsch, unfetters the longing that is merely exploited by the commerce that the kitsch serves.

— Theodor W. Adorno²