Mina Loy and lexicophilia

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the “lexicophilic” impulse in some forms of Anglo-American modernism to provide a context for a close examination of Mina Loy’s interest in unusual and recondite vocabularies. Like many modernist writers – Pound, Joyce, MacDiarmid, Barnes, Zukofsky, for example – Loy was an avid reader of dictionaries from which she mined what she called a “composite” language that deployed dialect and Latinate words along with others purloined from the technical fields of science and medicine. Loy’s ironic use of abstruse and specialized words serves both a satirical and a feminist agenda, producing a kind of verbal materiality that mocks intellectual pretension and deflates masculine authority by lending it “a ribald flavor of lubriciousness.” Extended comparison is made between the satirical modes of Loy and Wyndham Lewis whose work she greatly admired. It is characteristic of the hybrid nature of Loy’s feminism that she could see her own project in relation to the misogynist one of Lewis – for both, a satirical play with uncommon words was a means of attacking pretension and the false authority of metaphysics.