Cross-Cultural Baedeker: Mina Loy’s Cosmopolitan Modernism (original) (raw)

Perhaps more than any other female modernist, Loy embraced the idea of a deracinated, transnational subjectivity, as suggested by her ironic use of the Baedeker tour guides in the title of her poetic collections Lunar Baedecker [sic] 1 (1923) and Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables (1958). As Marjorie Perloff puts it, Loy can be seen as "the prototype of the deracinated cosmopolite, the sort of expatriate figure Eliot […] must have had in mind when he had the Waste Land's Marie say, 'Binn gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch'" (Perloff 132). Likewise, in his article "A Transnational Poetics," Jahan Ramazani discusses Loy's life and work as a particularly good example of "cross-national and crosscultural interstitiality" (Ramazani 340). Indeed, Loy may be viewed as a quintessentially interstitial figure, an exemplary globe-trotter and cross-cultural wanderer resisting national affiliations, while the tireless crossing of generic boundaries in her protean work may be seen as intrinsically related to her crossing of national boundaries.