Between Worlds: Mina Loy's Aesthetic Itineraries

320 Pages·2022·5.11 MB·English

by  Yasna Bozhkova

Seminal Modernisms is published in partnership with the Société d’Etudes
Modernistes (SEM), an international association devoted to the study of
modernist literature and the arts throughout continental Europe.
Series Editors
Hélène Aji, Université Paris Nanterre
Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, Caen-Normandy University
Editorial Advisory Board
Béatrice Mousli Bennett, University of Southern California
Catherine Bernard, Paris Diderot University
Sascha Bru, Université de Leuven
Noëlle Cuny, Université de Mulhouse
Stamatina Dimakopoulou, University of Athens
Catherine Lanone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3
Laura Marcus, University of Oxford
Scott McCracken, Queen Mary University of London
Peter Nicholls, New York University
Clément Oudart, Sorbonne
Caroline Pollentier, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3
Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania
Frédéric Regard, Sorbonne
Benoît Tadié, Université de Rennes 2
Naomi Toth, Université Paris Nanterre

© 2022 Clemson University
All rights reserved
First Edition, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949979-64-0 (print)
eISBN: 978-1-949979-65-7 (e-book)
Published by Clemson University Press
in association with Liverpool University Press
Clemson University Press is located in Clemson, SC.
For more information, please visit our website at www.clemson.edu/press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bozhkova, Yasna, author.
Title: Between worlds : Mina Loy’s aesthetic itineraries / Yasna Bozhkova.
Description: First edition. | Clemson : Clemson University Press, 2022. |
Series: Seminal modernisms | Includes bibliographical references and
index. | Summary: “This book provides an intertextual and intermedial
analysis of the work of modernist writer and cross-media artist Mina
Loy. It emphasizes her complex strategies of collage, condensation,
distortion, and displacement, as well as the importance of her perpetual
travel between disparate aesthetics, which becomes a means to critically
engage with the turbulence of avant-garde innovation of her time,
pinpointing the essential ephemerality of the avant-gardes”-- Provided
by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022023043 (print) | LCCN 2022023044 (ebook) | ISBN
9781949979640 (hardback) | ISBN 9781949979657 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Loy, Mina--Criticism and interpretation. | American
poetry--Women authors--History and criticism. | Avant-garde
(Aesthetics)--History--20th century. | Modernism (Literature)--United
States.
Classification: LCC PS3523.O975 Z56 2022 (print) | LCC PS3523.O975
(ebook) | DDC 811/.52--dc23/eng/20220610
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023043
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023044
Typeset in Minion Pro by Carnegie Book Production
Contents

List of Figures vii
List of Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
I The Origins of Loy’s Aesthetic Project
1 Dialectical Constellations in “Songs to Joannes” 21
2 Decapitating Futurism 55
3 “International Psycho-Democracy” and Utopian Artistic
Community 73
II Modernist Beacons
4 Towards a Modernist “Mond(e)Baedeker” 107
5 “Atlas of an Uncensored Earth”: Reawakening the Waste Land
of Tradition in “Joyce’s Ulysses” 133
6 A Cosmogony of Modernist Forms: Brancusi, Lewis, Stein,
Stravinsky 155
7 “Awander”: Loy, Pascin, and the Nomadic Self 187
v
III Towards a Final Incognito
8 Insel: The Isle of the Dead 201
9 Figuring (Co)loss(us) 241
10 “Refusees”: The Bum as the Spectral Double of the Artist in
Loy’s Bowery Work 253
Conclusion 277
Notes 281
Index 301
Figures
1 Joseph Cornell box of Mina Loy, undated. © Adagp, Paris 2
2 Félicien Rops, Pornokratès, La Dame au cochon, 1878 44
3 Georges Méliès, frame from Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902 58
4 Georges Méliès, frame from Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902 115
5 Mina Loy, Mappemondes, ca. 1920s. Courtesy of Roger
Conover, Mina Loy’s editor and literary executor 124
6 Max Ernst, Au rendez-vous des amis, 1922. © Adagp, Paris 128
7 Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919. © Succession Brancusi. All rights
reserved. Adagp, Paris 156
8 Mina Loy, Brancusi, ca. 1920s. Image courtesy of Roger Conover 159
9 Wyndham Lewis, The Starry Sky, 1917. Arts Council
Collection, Southbank Centre. London/Bridgeman Images 171
10 Wyndham Lewis, The Enemy of the Stars, 1914 172
11 Mina Loy, Pascin, ca. 1920s. Image courtesy of Roger Conover 191
12 Mina Loy, Drift of Chaos—Chantiers des Mondes, ca. 1933.
Image courtesy of Roger Conover 215
13 André Breton, Poem Object, 1941. © Adagp, Paris 246
vii
viii Between Worlds
14 Mina Loy, No Parking, early 1950s. Image courtesy of
Roger Conover 255
15 Mina Loy, Bowery Construction (with Marcel Duchamp),
ca. early 1950s. Image courtesy of Roger Conover 256
Abbreviations
BML Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
BMLP Mina Loy Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University
I Mina Loy. Insel. Ed. Elizabeth Arnold. New York: Melville
House, 2014
LaLB Mina Loy. The Last Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover.
Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982
LoLB Mina Loy. The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover.
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1997
SE Mina Loy. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy. Ed. Sara Crangle.
London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2011
ix