Autonomy and Commitment and the Woman Modernist: The Example of Mina Loy
p. 81-91
Résumé
This paper will attempt to explore the questions of autonomy and commitment in relation to the work of female modernist Mina Loy, and to underline her unique position in this respect. It contends that it is not simply by dint of aesthetic eclecticism, but also through her equivocal, paradoxical explorations of the limits of both autonomy and commitment for artist and artwork, that Loy troubles the very self-containment of established narratives of modernism, at once affirming and challenging the theories of her male high-modernist peers, whilst anticipating and complicating later feminist re-readings of the period.
Texte intégral
1The early decades of the twentieth century remain noteworthy in the history of British literature not least because a significant number of the modernist writers of the period both self-consciously engaged with the political, yet sought to banish it from artistic practice, at once took inspiration from the social and economic upheaval that marked their age while, disenchanted and aloof, posited art as a last-ditch buffer to ‘shore’ against a civilisation in ruins—‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary culture’1 as T.S. Eliot had it.
2More specifically for many of the most prominent modernists, ‘making it new’ required a jettisoning of the democratic impulse in all its myriad guises—be it political democracy and the fight for equality and rights, or cultural democratisation: ‘the artist [...] has dabbled in democracy and he is now done with that folly [...] the aristocracy of the arts is ready again for its service’ declared Pound in 1914.2 For Eliot writing in 1923, art was ‘opposed to the eclectic democratic mind of the last century’,3 and by 1939, such indictments had gained the status of a near-irrefutable self-evidence. According to W.H. Auden, one response alone could be envisaged: ‘the most obvious social fact of the last forty years is the failure of liberal capital democracy [...] the results are only too familiar to us all’.4
3Pitting themselves and their art against the alienating effects of inclusive social democracy, that version of modernism described by Adorno as ‘social primarily because it stands opposed to society’5 committed the artwork to an elitist Eurocentric heritage as it attempted to preserve itself from contemporary cultural mediocracy. Allegiance to a noble literary lineage or ‘order’ was claimed—Eliot’s famous ‘Tradition’ of ‘European or English literature’—, the salutary guarantor of ‘conformity between the old and the new’.6
4But at the same time as Eliot’s elitist modernist theory placed the artwork firmly within a hallowed cultural continuum, it also effected the ‘extinction’ of the artist’s ‘personality’ (53) and divorced the artwork from individual experience and emotion: ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’ (54). The autotelic poem, disengaged from the both creator and the socio-political context of creation, could then as Eliot argued, ‘in some sense, ha [ve] its own life’.7 Moreover, the artwork would exhibit the rigour and rationality of science, constituting, as Eliot comments in his essay on Hamlet, the ‘formula’ or ‘objective correlative’8 of emotion, rather than its direct expression. A similar analogy was adopted by Pound when he advocated the ‘welding of word and thing’ in literature,9 thereby suggesting the fashioning of signifier and signified into an impenetrable and autonomous unit.
5Moreover, as critics have increasingly observed, ‘orthodox’10 high modernism was also crucially a gender-inflected ideology; if art was to be protected from the contemporary democratic impulse, it equally had to remain a male preserve.11 For influential modernists such as Eliot, Pound and T.E. Hulme, the exclusion of ‘feminine’ sentimental excess, and its aesthetic corollary, romanticism, imposed itself as a prerequisite of artistic creation; good poetry was connoted as soberly virile ‘austere, direct, free from emotional slither’,12 ‘hard and dry’,13 the innovative artist became the self-appointed champion in a furious battle against imprecision and feminine inertia, as Pound famously declared: ‘man [is] really the phallus or spermatozoide charging head-on, the female chaos [...] even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London’.14 Among the Italian Futurists, too, the conflation is predictably direct: ‘we strong Futurists have felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have become too earthly, or to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth we ought to abandon.’15
6To what degree the high modernist canon truly puts such theories into practice has of course been the source of increasing debate.16 But this has not prevented critical receptions from aping the dichotomies articulated by high modernist theory, alternatively chiding the modernist his ‘scandalous and embarrassing’17 reactionary politics uncomfortably at odds with the newly emergent mass democratic state, or conveniently emptying the artwork of political relevance. Of the former camp, Lionel Trilling numbers among the most strident detractors: ‘these men do not seem to confirm us in the social and political ideals we hold’18 he argued in the 1940s. It has however been to a large degree the latter, which, in inspiring the New Critical model of literature as a reified yet ‘organic whole’ has instituted a particularly tenacious critical paradigm. For many, the high modernist model of the de-historicised, self-sufficent, ‘well-wrought’19 poetic artefact defined modernism once and for all—‘linguistic autotelism or aesthetic withdrawal from a debased mass culture’,20 in the words of Patricia Waugh, or for Frederic Jameson, a ‘perfected poetic apparatus’ that, in repressing the historical, enacted political disengagement.21
7The long-marginalised British women modernists of whom Dorothy Richardson, Mary Butts, Mina Loy, (with Virginia Woolf standing as the one rule-confirming exception), increasingly in academic vogue following their rediscovery since the 1970s, have provided modernist studies with a newly acceptable face. Their writings, as Loy scholar Rachel Potter glosses, have been assumed to embrace a more liberal, less supremacist literary tradition—‘the radical force of the feminine, women’s writing [...] is produced through its disruption of the elitist male modernist text’22—and to readily combine experimental method and confessional or personal modes, as Suzanne Clark’s Sentimental Modernism23 or the resolutely biographical stance of studies such as Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank24 clearly testify. Many feminist critics have indeed chosen to present the women modernists—the ‘silenced makers of modernism’ Bonnie Kime Scott calls them25—as effecting a sort of return of the literary repressed, bursting onto the stage of male modernism from which they had been excluded, whilst Claire Joubert and Alice Jardine set the ‘gynetic’ record straight, reinstating a feminine matrix ‘intrinsic to the condition of modernity’:26
L’émergence d’une poétique de l’écriture au féminin [...] n’est pas simplement concomitante du modernisme mais participe pleinement, si elle n’est pas le moteur même, de son projet d’expérimentation formelle et de ses nouvelles explorations du matériel symbolique.27
8For his part Andreas Huyssen’s highly influential reappraisal of the modernist model, After the Great Divide, aligns bourgeois mass culture, the quotidian and the feminine as hapless, hybrid Others to be salvaged and valorised in opposition to the ‘purity and autonomy’28 of the patrilineal high modernist canon.
9Appealing though Huyssen’s and other refigurings of modernism most undeniably are, their post-modern vantage point remains underpinned by an adherence to contemporary consumerist democracy and identity politics which betray a prismatic belief in political progress. Such an apparently ‘modernising’ stance itself runs the risk of dulling the truly radical challenge posited by modernism’s questioning of enlightenment optimism, or in Rachel Potter’s words:
in the face of this notion of democratic freedom, the claims of modernist writers to literary autonomy are seen as attempts to defend an elite minority culture against the values of a rapidly expanding market-place (4).
10Perhaps more than any other female modernist, the example of British-born poet, novelist, artist, and sometime lamp-shade designer, Mina Loy lays bare the limits of both ‘orthodox’ and ‘refigured’29 narratives of modernism, most self-evidently perhaps because both person and poetics resist easy classification and interpretation, thwarting even the most dogged theorist’s attempts at categorisation, as Rob Sheffield has jauntily and irreverently observed:
Nobody seems to agree on who Mina Loy really is: a poet? A real poet? A great poet? A character? A feminist icon? A well-connected dilletante? A fashion plate? A nice little role model? A boho scam artist? A mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know psycho drama-vampire lampshade pimp?30
11The question was already being posed at the height of her notoriety in the 1910s and 20s when Loy’s braving of contemporary sexual, social and aesthetic mores propelled her into the limelight of the popular press, the New York Evening Sun duly designating her as prime exemplar of the new ‘Modern Woman’ in 1917, while remaining finally baffled by this inscrutable cipher of modernity: ‘Who is this modern woman that people are always talking about’ it asked, before branding her ‘one of the causes of modernism—whatever that is’.31
12Ostensibly at least, however, Loy would seem to fit the ‘refigured’ women modernist template perfectly. Once her explicitly erotic verse had fallen foul of the censors, the iconic avant-gardist mascot became one of modernism’s most successfully silenced makers, re-attracting critical attention for the first time in the early 1980s with Virginia Kouidis’ monograph32 and a re-edition of her collected works, The Last Lunar Baedeker, only intermittently in print since the 1920s.33 Carolyn Burke’s acclaimed biography34 and a number of important comparative studies have since fuelled the growing academic and general interest in her work, attested by well over a hundred MLA bibliography entries.
13Similarly, the very plurality of Loy’s jointly experimental and commercial output would appear to flout the ‘purity and autonomy’ of the high modernist canon discerned by Huyssen and others. Loy’s hybrid production transcends the limits of aesthetic genre to encompass plays, poems, manifestoes, essays, novels, paintings, collages, sculptures, fashions, drapes and designs, each attracting a particular audience. Indeed, not only were Loy’s paintings exhibited at the Parisian Salon d’Automne from 1903-7, her poetry and literary essays a regular feature in the ‘little magazines’ of the 1910s and 20s, but also her lampshades and illuminating devices spawned a briefly prosperous gallery in Paris’s rue Saint Honoré and this in spite of the artist’s professed aversion to commerce.
14Moreover, its experimental form notwithstanding, Loy’s poetry has tended to lend itself to biographical mappings, her most frequently quoted poems, ‘Love Song to Joannes’ and ‘An Effectual Marriage’ for example, being respectively read as daringly salacious and bitterly sardonic responses to the poet’s failed liaisons with Futurists Marinetti and Papini. Finally, Loy’s ideological allegiances, and her explicit enjoining of the political and the aesthetic, most notably in her prose pieces ‘A Feminist Manifesto’ (1914)35 and ‘International Psycho-Democracy’ (1921)36 both challenge the high-modernist injunction to sever the ties between artwork and its socio-historical context, and articulate the artist’s own highly individual political imperatives.
15Certainly, as a female artist operating within the context of women’s suffrage, the issue of political and economic agency may be presumed to have a particular and personal resonance for Loy not least because she did not benefit from the financial security of many of her female modernist peers, but Loy’s attitude to direct political engagement remains ambivalent all the same. Most strikingly perhaps, she evinced clear reservations about the value of the reformist imperatives underpinning the organized women’s movements of the time, such as the British suffragettes, admitting in a letter to Mabel Dodge of being ‘rather hopeless of the Woman cause’.37 Similarly, Loy remains sceptical of the real advances to be achieved though informing and educating the masses, too readily prey to a de-humanizing commercial media, against which her own subtler, politico-poetic pronouncements are pitted: ‘The Psycho-Democrat is [...] the living successor of that travesty of man, the Dummy Public, originated by the Press, financed by the Capitalist’ (Loy 1921). Yet Loy’s adherence to all the significant movements of the modernist period—she was an honorary (albeit temporary) Futurist, a colleague of Gertrude Stein, linked to the Poundian Modernist enterprise, the widow of Dadaist icon and pugilist Arthur Cravan, as well as being a self-proclaimed feminist ‘psycho-democratist’—suggests both a desire for, and profound wariness, even, of aesthetic engagement. Much of Loy’s writing expresses a sense of the salutary power of high art and articulates a commitment to preserving it; Loy’s 1924 critical analysis of Gertrude Stein’s writing for instance celebrates modernism’s near-messianic potential to transfigure mundane reality: ‘modernism is a prophet crying in the wilderness of stabilized culture that humanity is wasting it’s [sic] aesthetic time’;38 at the same time, her ironic late modernist novel Insel39 can be read as a bathetic allegory of the demise of the artist as self-sufficient island.
16Finally—and it is this perhaps that best defines Loy’s artistic strategies as women artist operating within the context of masculinist modernism—, she exhibits what the critic Alex Goody terms an ‘enunciative instability’,40 enabling her at once to stand clearly inside and remain elusively outside orthodox modernist praxis. Indeed, if Loy like Pound explicitly championed the ‘aristocracy’ of art, her wantonly paradoxical aphorism ‘anarchists in art are art’s instantaneous aristocracy’41 concomitantly advocated the wresting of aesthetics from the noble ranks of literary tradition and lineage. A letter from Mina Loy to Carl Van Vechten, written in 1915, describing the experimental method she was using on a novel, similarly suggests the degree to which she consciously sustained simultaneous contradiction: ‘it is absolutely personal & entirely impersonal-It tries to analyse moods-newly-it never gets away from fact- & is tremendously imaginative-brutally impartial & never unkind’.42 In this wilfully aporetic theory of writing, Loy characteristically employs a dialectical process where an emphasis on exacting artistic objective detachment, uncannily redolent of Eliot’s pronouncements on the question, enjoins the supposedly contrary subjective approach he so vociferously deplored. The artwork is posited at once as self-sufficient entity and privileged vector of the artist’s own emotions and condition.
17In the 1924 essay on Gertrude Stein, Loy again employs a rhetorical move akin to that of ‘Tradition and the Individual talent’43 when she adopts the mode of scientific analogy to celebrate the radical autonomy of language in Stein—language for Loy which has been liberated from the cloying dictates of sentiment and convention: ‘Curie/ of the laboratory/ of vocabulary/ she crushed/ the tonnage/ of consciousness/ congealed to phrases/ to extract/ a radium of the word’ (430). Yet once more, while proclaiming the power of linguistic autotelism, through a direct parallel with the famous female physicist, Loy simultaneously pays homage to the artwork’s crucially gendered creator.
18It was not surprisingly the dearth of ‘womanish’ sentiment they perceived in Loy’s writing that earned the poet the most compliments among the male modernists. Pound’s 1918 appraisal of Loy and Marianne Moore published in the Little Review identifies them as major proponents of the American literary vanguard and praises them for their ‘arid clarity’ of expression: ‘their writing is neither sensuous nor passionate [...] in the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion, in that of Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatsoever’.44 Significantly, it is in the context of this discussion of Loy’s verse that Pound first produced his account of ‘logopoeia’, as a self-referential, autonomous, discursive practice: ‘a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas [...] poetry that is akin to nothing but language’.
19Yet if Loy evidently admired the experimental Stein for her skilful crafting of word, for her ability to obtain from a ‘basic [...] bare statement’ the ‘belle matière’ of language, and the need to release language from what she called the ‘glass case of tradition’, Loy also employs her own ‘logopoeia’ to engage directly with the emergent mass democratic state, particularly as it impacted on the situation of women. Just as Loy questions the extent to which liberal democracy truly liberates the minds and intellects of the ‘Dummy Public’ in ‘International Psycho-Democracy’ so her ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (1914) evinces clear reservations about the evolution of female emancipation: here, Loy challenges the intrinsic value of aligning women with men in the democratic equation and rather argues for the radical specificity of the female subject,
The feminist movement as at present instituted is
Inadequate...
NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition will bring about Reform, the only method is Absolute Demolition
Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice-crusades and uniform education...
& deny at the outset that pathetic claptrap war cry Woman is the equal of man—for She is NOT! (153)
20Yet while Loy flouts the liberal rights-based focus of existing feminist politics, this is less a rejection of political engagement than an a questioning of the autonomy it purports to deliver: only by introducing new ways of thinking and creating may the individual subject be truly liberated. Instead, using the avant-gardist tactics of shock and irreverence which she had learned from her contact with Italian futurists, Loy herself inhabits the generic form of the political tract the better to explode its discursive limits. Expressing profound reservations concerning the value of mass democracy not dissimilar to those voiced by the male modernists with whom I began this paper, Loy suggests that female autonomy can only be won through the liberation of feminine sexuality and the language of female desire from the fallacies underpinning Victorian double-standards and prudery: ‘to obtain results you must make sacrifices and the first and greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your “virtue”’ (154).
21In condoning the seemingly draconian ‘unconditional surgical destruction of virginity throughout the female population at puberty’, Loy was not simply out to outrage, but gesturing to the Madonna/whore double-bind which both women were both measured in society and figured in literature, seeking to attack at its roots the linguistic propriety that disenfranchised the female subject in a far more fundamental way by perpetuating internalized forms of psychic imprisonment: ‘seek within yourself to find out what you are. At the moment you have the choice between Parasitism, Prostitution and Negation’. This acute awareness of the dangers of adhering a uniquely mimetic form of political commitment that will only replicate existing structures can be observed in the experimental forms and subject matter of Loy’s verse that brazenly flout the conventions of sexual-textual propriety, as the following extract from the opening of the Loy’s infamous and censored Love Songs amply demonstrates:
Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the Appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
‘Once upon a time’
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucus-membrane (53)
22Dismissing as ‘fantasy’ the fairy-tale narratives that sustain and underpin normative ‘appraisable’ notions of womanhood, Loy’s irreverential verve topples the easy complacency of received cultural hierarchies (‘Pig Cupid’) and their concomitant aesthetic corollaries—unlike Eliot, it is the futility of cultural order, particularly its gender-inflected constructs, rather than artistic anarchy, that characterise contemporary culture and society. Likewise, as examination of Loy’s poetic manifestoes has demonstrated, her essentially aporetic and iconoclastic modus operandi sit equally uncomfortably within the bounds of conventional political engagement with its consensual notions of democracy and progress. Through her equivocal explorations of the limits of both autonomy and commitment for artist and artwork, Loy’s production may be deemed to threaten the self-containment of orthodox versions of modernism, at once affirming and calling into question the aesthetic precepts of many of her peers, while also providing an original and complex, truly modernist response to many of the political debates of her day.
Notes de bas de page
1 T.S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses Order and Myth’, Dial 75 (November 1923): 480-3, 483.
2 Ezra Pound, ‘The New Sculpture’, The Egoist 1.4 (1914): 68.
3 T.S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Criterion 2.7 (1924): 231.
4 W.H. Auden, ‘The Public v. the Late Mr William Butler Yeats’, The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) 392.
5 Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990) 41.
6 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; London: Methuen, 1928) 47-59, 50.
7 T.S. Eliot, ‘Preface to the 1928 edition’ (Eliot 1928, x).
8 T.S. Eliot, ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ (Eliot 1928, 95-103, 100).
9 Letter to William Carlos Williams, 11 September 1920. Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D.D. Paige (London: Faber & Faber, 1980) 158.
10 In the sense that Antoine Campagnon employs it. Les cinq paradoxes de la modernité (Paris: Seuil) 1990.
11 Or as Celeste Schenck puts it of the male modernists, ‘ [they] willingly consigned poetic forms into the hands of genteel poetesses, keeping the “new poetry” safe for the experimenters, that form-breakers, and the vers-librists’—that is the men’. See Celeste Schenck, ‘Exiled by Genre: Modernism, Canonicity and the Politics of Exclusion,’ Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: U N. Carolina P., 1989) 226-50, 226.
12 Ezra Pound, Literary Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1954) 12.
13 T.E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism & Classicism’ (c.1912), Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1924) 113-40, 126.
14 Ezra Pound, trans. & afterword, Natural Philosophy of Love, Rémy de Gourmont (New York: Rarity, 1931) 169.
15 F.T. Marinetti, ‘Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine’, Marinetti: Selected Writings, ed. R.W. Flint, trans. R.W. Flint & Arthur A. Coppotelli (London: Secker & Warburg, 1972) 75.
16 See for instance Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP) 1998.
17 ‘The politics of Yeats, Eliot and Pound have long been a scandal’. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Modernism: Yeats, Eliot and Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991) 1.
18 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) 299.
19 See Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, Studies in the Structure of Poetry (Orlando, FL.: Harcourt & Brace, 1947).
20 Patricia Waugh, Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (London: Edward Arnold, 1992) 99. See also Astradur Eysteinsson: ‘indeed, when critics use the term “modernist criticism”, they often seem to be referring to New Criticism, and they appear unaware that there need be no “natural” connection between modernist works and this particular analytical or critical paradigm’ (Eystensson 11).
21 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell UP) 280.
22 Rachel Potter, Modernism and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford UP 2006) 2.
23 Suzanne Clark, Sentimental Modernism, Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991).
24 Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900-1940 (1986; London: Virago 1987).
25 Bonnie Kime Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990) v.
26 Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis, Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 25: ‘gynesis—the putting into discourse of “woman” as that process intrinsic to the condition of modernity’.
27 Claire Joubert, Lire le féminin (Paris: Messene, 1997) 8.
28 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide, Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 54.
29 See Bonnie Kime Scott’s Refiguring Modernism which proposes an alternative triad, ‘The Women of 1928’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
30 Rob Sheffield, ‘Mina Loy in too much too soon: poetry/celebrity/sexuality/modernity’, Literary Review 46.4 (2003) 625. It is a portrait the masquerading Loy herself might well have applauded. Born of mixed English Protestant and Jewish descent Loy dubbed herself the ‘Anglo-Mongrel’, and donned a number of noms de plume—the name Loy itself replacing the paternal ‘Lowy’ and marital ‘Haweis’ for a start—and as many critics have noted, surreptitiously inhabited her poems through a number of theatrical guises. The self-obfuscation was such that by the 1920s rumour had it that Loy was not a real person but a forged persona.
31 Anonymous, ‘Do You Strive to Capture the Symbols of Your Reactions?’, New York Evening Sun, 13 Feb. 1917: 10. Quoted by Linda Kinnahan, Poetics of the Feminine (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 51.
32 Virginia Kouidis, Mina Loy, American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980).
33 Mina Loy, The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Highlands: The Jargon Society, 1982).
34 Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern, The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996).
35 Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997) 53-70, 36-39, 149-156.
36 Mina Loy, ‘International Psycho-Democracy’, Little Review 8.1 (Autumn 1921): 14-19.
37 Quoted by Cristanne Miller, Cultures of Modernism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2005) 60.
38 Mina Loy, Transatlantic Review 2.2 (1924): 430.
39 Mina Loy, Insel, ed. Elisabeth Arnold (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1991).
40 Alex Goody, ‘Gender, Authority and the Speaking Subject, or: Who is Mina Loy?’, www.scc.rutgers.edu/however/v1\_5\_2001/current/in-conference/mina-loy/goody.html, 3, 1 July 2003.
41 Quoted by Stephanie Buchanan, ‘Mina Loy, Revolutionary Ironist’,www.ags.uci.edu/\-{}clcwegsa/revolutions/Buchanan.htm, 1, 6 January 2006.
42 Quoted by Amy Feinstein, ‘Goy Interrupted: Mina Loy’s Unfinished Novel and Mongrel Jewish Fiction’, Modern Fiction Studies 51.2 (Summer 2005): 335-355, 335.
43 ‘It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide’ (53).
44 Ezra Pound, ‘A List of Books’, Little Review 4.11 (March 1918): 54-58.
Auteur
-
Margaret Gillespie
University of Franche-Comté
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