A Shattered Visage: Modernity and its visual role in Shelley's Ozymandias Barring some unforeseen individual circumstance, you can always count on your eyesight as one of your primary avenues of perception. This has always been the case for mankind, our gift of vision has allotted us the ability to reproduce images of the world around us in our own right. We can craft a version of the world entirely out of our minds. We have created billion dollar industries on the reproduction and sale of images and effectively monetized one of the most basic forms of perception. But what if vision, something we like to swear by in our media-saturated society, doesn't work the same ways at the same times? Does the experience of looking at the Mona Lisa in 1814 differ from looking at it in the year 2014? Did the Sistine Chapel mean something completely different to someone first seeing it as opposed to someone seeing it on some tour in the present day? The two pieces I chose to discuss deal with these questions a lot. Percy Bysshe Shelley's seminal sonnet “Ozymandias” deals with a traveler looking at the remains of a massive statue and empire hundreds, if not thousands of years later. Jonathan Crary's “Modernity and the Problem of the Observer” deals with how our modes of visual perception have changed drastically from the pre-industrial era into the digital age, where the infinite replication of images is the norm. In marrying commentary on both of these literary artifacts, I will attempt to argue that the act of sight is not a catch-all or a universal standard for understanding an image and that “ways of seeing” are often subject to the whims of history. In terms of the amount of imagery packed into a very short piece of text, Shelley's Ozymandias stands alone as a particularly dense sonnet. The poem starts off with Shelley's narrator (or perhaps Shelley himself) describing