Between Worlds

Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries

AvYasna Bozhkova

Inbunden, Engelska, 2022

Del i serien Clemson University Press: Seminal Modernisms

2 290 kr

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Beskrivning

This book provides a new critical reappraisal of the work of modernist writer and artist Mina Loy. Primarily known for her daring and difficult poems, Loy was also the author of a dazzling variety of other literary and visual artworks in different genres and media. My reading demonstrates the richness and complexity of her work beyond the more often-explored path from Futurism to Dada to Surrealism, emphasizing the importance of her perpetual travel between disparate aesthetics. Engaging in a close analysis of her poetry, essays, manifestoes, and novel Insel, I unearth a multiplicity of hidden literary and pictorial intertexts in her works. Tracing the origins of Loy’s often puzzling imagery, I examine the complex strategies of collage, condensation, distortion, and displacement through which she conflates multiple allusions in enigmatic constellations. I challenge T.S. Eliot’s claim that Loy lacks an œuvre, claiming that there is an aesthetic project, or at least a paradoxical unity in her famously fragmented work. I show how her writings critically engage with the turbulence of avant-garde innovation of her time, pinpointing the essential ephemerality of the avant-gardes and their tendency to become dogmatic ideologies. Through a perpetual shift of the aesthetic paradigm, Loy’s work creates dialogic exchanges between different experimental aesthetic programs. Thus, the book positions Loy not only as an important artist, but also as a major theorist of modernist and avant-garde aesthetics.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2022-07-20
Mått:163 x 239 x undefined mm
Format:Inbunden
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Clemson University Press: Seminal Modernisms
Antal sidor:320
Förlag:Clemson University Digital Press
ISBN:9781949979640

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Mer om författaren

Yasna Bozhkova is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Nanterre. Her research focuses on intertextual, intermedial and intercultural poetics from transatlantic modernism to the present. Her first monograph, titled Between Worlds: Mina Loy’s Aesthetic Itineraries, was published in 2022 by Clemson University Press. She is also the co-editor of several special issues, including “African American Voices from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present: Establishing/Abolishing Authority” (French Review of American Studies) and “‘The Contour of an Electric Spirit’: Revisiting Mina Loy in the 21st Century” (Feminist Modernist Studies). She has published articles and book chapters on modernist and contemporary poetry and fiction, as well as avant-garde experimentation across the arts. She is a board member of the Société d’études modernistes and of the MSA.

Recensioner i media

‘This monograph’s strength is that it embraces a vast array of sources to draw creative connections that pay homage to Loy’s own predilection for plurality and irreducibility. Its ample use of visual references, beyond just the usual intertextual ones, is particularly valuable for analyzing Loy, whose artistically trained eye lent special importance to such… Between Worlds is such an expansive offering that readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Loy will find it a beneficial and thought-provoking read.’ Jennifer Ashby, Modernism/modernity

Innehållsförteckning

IntroductionPart I: The Origins of Loy’s Aesthetic ProjectChapter 1: Dialectical Constellations in Songs to JoannesChapter 2: Decapitating FuturismChapter 3: “International Psycho-Democracy” and Utopian Artistic CommunityPart II: Modernist BeaconsChapter 4: Towards a Modernist “Mond(e)Baedeker” Chapter 5: “Atlas of an Uncensored Earth”: Reawakening the Waste Land of Tradition in “Joyce’s Ulysses” Chapter 6: A Cosmogony of Modernist Forms: Brancusi, Lewis, Stein, Stravinsky Chapter 7: “Awander”: Loy, Pascin, and the Nomadic SelfPart III: Towards a Final IncognitoChapter 8: Insel: The Isle of the DeadChapter 9: Figuring (Co)loss(us)Chapter 10: “Refusees”: The Bum as the Spectral Double of the Artist in Loy’s Bowery WorkConclusion