Mina Loy’s Dialogic and “Narratable” Selves

This chapter argues that Loy’s constant concern with autobiography relies on poetic and narrative forms which construe selfhood as dialogic, rather than self-contained. On the basis of Loy’s critique of authorship and autobiographism, the author argues that Loy’s unfinished autobiographical projects (the writing of which formed the accompaniment to her whole career) should also be deemed to include her novel Insel, a work of biofiction and a collaborative autobiography. The chapter makes the case that “Songs to Johannes”, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Insel, some early poems and unpublished works, claim authorship and interiority as fundamental categories of literary production and reception, but construct selfhood as inherently dialogic and narrative. This is particularly evident when Loy rewrites contemporary authors and uses their voices, as in the case of Papini and Barnes, and in Insel, which the author reads in dialogue with Carl Van Vechten’s novel Peter Whiffle. This analysis is based on Adriana Cavarero’s notion of “narratable selves.”

Loy’s Dialogue with Lacerba and Italian Feminism

This chapter contextualizes Loy's readings of Futurist ideas and aesthetics within the specificity of the Florentine avant-garde; it analyzes Loy’s responses to the writings and ideas on sexuality, sexual morality, feminism, motherhood, genius, autobiographism and avant-garde art, published in the magazines Lacerba (1913–1915) and La Voce (1908–1916), which have so far been neglected by scholarship. The chapter shows that the reception of Otto Weininger's and Karl Kraus’s works in Lacerba at the hand of Giovanni Papini infiltrated Loy's early texts, together with the debates on similar questions in the expatriate community. It analyzes the echoes between Loy's poems and the writings of Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo and Enif Robert. The author here argues that Loy’s aesthetics began to crystallize as a form of critique of the fundamental categories pertaining to the definition of art, artwork and author, as well as of gender identity, on the basis of the Florentine sources and debates that she incorporated into her writing. The chapter thus contributes to a necessary decentering and regionalizing of modernism, complicating the picture of modernist internationalism.

Conclusion

The conclusion presents an overview of the book’s argument and shows how each chapter contributes to the thesis that Loy’s corpus creates a “critical modernism” and various eccentric positions which enable this constantly self-reflexive and critical stance with respect to modernist aesthetics, culture and, partially, politics. By adopting “eccentricity” as a critical concept and instrument, this study suggests that rather than relegating Loy to a marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women), who did not fit the criteria of high modernism, her work should be recognized as writing the possibility of critical gaze into the very heart of the avant-garde and modernist canon.

Eccentricity, Affiliation, and Distance in Loy’s Corpus

This chapter explores the notions of eccentricity, cosmopolitanism and belonging, focusing mostly on “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”, “Goy Israel” and later poems about New York and the United States. The author here argues that Loy’s corpus creates an eccentric position, similar to the notion of eccentricity theorized by Luisa Muraro and de Lauretis: eccentricity does not imply weirdness or frivolity, but rather a subject’s ability to stay outside the normative order, without either transgressing or conforming to it. The chapter shows that this notion informs not only Loy’s aesthetics and life, but also her reception, and makes the case that Loy’s eccentric stance is also a political position, especially in the last phase of her career. In Loy’s late texts, modernist art seems to celebrate life and democracy, without falling into the traps of nationalism. The “American” poems and prose fragments critically reflect on the dynamics of identity based on geographical location and belonging, and take up marginal gazes, which can accommodate an ever-critical, unsentimental and detached perspective.

Introduction

The introduction offers a brief outline of standard and more recent scholarship on Loy and her reception; it introduces the concept of “critical modernism,” on the basis of fundamental works dedicated to the theory of the avant-garde, and argues that Loy’s highly diverse corpus of works adheres to well-known protocols of avant-garde and modernist aesthetics, but simultaneously questions them. The chapter also offers a brief summary of the book’s argument and of the single chapters; it outlines the tension in Loy’s corpus between an affirmative early modernist aesthetic, and a critical stance which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist and art, relating this tension to a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity and subjectivity.

The Objects of Poetry and the Economics of Art

This chapter focuses on Loy's ambivalent and subtle understanding of the processes underpinning the creation of the economic and symbolic value of artworks, or the economic and cultural processes validating and sustaining their privileged status. Drawing on modernist aesthetics, critical theory and thing theory, the chapter examines early and later texts in dialogue with works by Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, and shows how Loy proposes a dialogic version of the art work as encounter, collaboration, or event, rather than as a self-contained masterpiece. In this chapter the author analyses the notion of artistic creation as labor, investigates the status of Loy’s poetic objects in relation to the world of commerce and of commodities, and explores Loy’s critical assessment of the author’s signature within the “culture industry”.