Cross-Cultural Baedeker: Mina Loy’s Cosmopolitan Modernism (original) (raw)
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Canon and Border Crossing in the work of Mina Loy
Les réécritures du canon dans la littérature féminine de langue anglaise, 2011
The figure of the artist-poet Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been largely ignored until quite recently. One possible reason for this disregard may be the radical and experimental form of her poetry and her difficult negotiations between the concrete and the abstract. Loy has been labelled a Futurist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Feminist, Conceptualist, Modernist, and Post-modernist. Experimenting with media in her artwork, she moved from oil to ink in her early 1910s paintings and created sculptures with items and garbage cans collected from the streets in Manhattan in the 1950s. She allied herself with her visual art more than her writing, claiming at the end of her life that she never was a poet. One of the aims of this article is to establish the means Loy uses to avoid categorization, to remain ambiguously "suspended between free love and social purity, literature and science, sentimentalism and modernism" 1. Another aspect of my research will be the exploration of interdisciplinary canon-breaking crossings within Loy's poetry in order to see to what extent her work contributes to "forge new relations between these allegedly incompatible disciplines" 2. In this sense, Loy may be seen as a thief of patriarchal language, as recent feminist critical revisions have claimed, or perhaps she is rather persistently avoiding the definition of identity in
Mina Loy's poem "Anglo-Mongrel and the Rose," both in its sections and its entirety, is decentered in its semantic structure leaving numerous gaps in the textual mesh. On the printed page, the poem clearly shows visible spaces between words. These spases may be seen as an element in the set of visual peculiarities of the poem. In general, these spatial and visual features take the place of conventional punctuations. If it may be assumed that punctuation represents the suprasegmental aspects of spoken language, it may also be understood that punctuation operates under the same linearity as speech, which characterizes patriarchy. Thus, it can be concluded that the visual and spatial features represent the general breaking away from linearity and therefore also patriarchal language. While the language of the Law regulates the symbolic function, the chora lays out the field for the body to dance in. In Loy’s “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” spaces between words and lines indicate that the poem operates within the semiotic function allowed by the spaces provided by the chora. In conventional syntax, words occupy a one-dimensional line which uncompromisingly regulate words into a series. The spaces in this particular poem of Loy’s—not many show this characteristic\—open additional levels of space into which the word can slip out of linearity and obtain a oblique relationship with other words in the poem, revealing a visually apparent collocative and associative relationship.
A recent revisionary focus for the so-called new modernist studies has been the relationship between high modernism and formal preoccupations of interwar novelists who followed in its wake. This essay, contributing to this ongoing work about the distinctive innovations of late-modernist writing, considers British women writers who extended the heritage of the regional novel while accommodating the ambitions of modernist experimentalism. Although assumptions about the retrogressive nature of fiction from the 1930s and 40s -including its relegation of stylistic virtuosity in favor of social commentary, its supposed affinity with Victorian classic realism, and its concomitant resistance to subjectivity-centered techniques of interiority and indirectness -have come under scrutiny by reassessments of the period, what is less well recognized, let alone analyzed, is the extent to which such different writers as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Storm Jameson, and Rosamond Lehmann capitalized on the advancements of their modernist-Impressionist precursors to develop new modes for engagement with provincial environments.
A Curse On Your Ancestors: Exploring the 'Mongrelization' of Mina Loy
In the early twentieth century, traditional Europe fell apart. Out of the chaos and uncertainty fostered by World War I grew Modernism, a movement marked by drastic breaks from the traditions of Western art and culture (Abrams 202). Through this schism, Modernists found the freedom to forge their cultural future; for Modernist artist and poet Mina Loy, this freedom allowed her to forge a cultural purpose for her “mongrelized” ancestry. In Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, Loy allegorizes her Hungarian-Jewish father, her English-Christian mother, and herself as Exodus, the English Rose, and Ova, respectively, to illustrate not only the chaos to be found in cross-cultural marriage, but also the artistic freedom and beauty to be found in its consummation and procreation. In my essay, I argue that Loy’s frequent use of discordant imagery, pauses and enjambment within her verse suggest the fragmentation of Exodus’s Hungarian-Jewish identity in his attempts to assimilate to English culture and identity through marriage to the English Rose. Out of the discord of their union grows Ova, an ungendered, dehumanized entity that represents the uniting of her parents’ cultures in “mongrelized” human form. Through my exploration of Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, I demonstrate that Ova’s creation of a new poetry allegorizes Loy’s belief that the fragmentation of nationalism is a necessity for the birth of a new twentieth century culture.