Mina Loy's Critical Modernism by Laura Scuriatti

Abstract

 Reviews possession of language. How does one represent the non-human in narrative, and what debates must ensue about the nature and limits of anthropocentrism? Jon Hegglund’s contribution makes claims for the power of narrative in highlighting non-human agency (in horror literature or sci-fi). Mention is also made in the Introduction of children’s fiction, which is so oen about animals, though children’s literature is sadly absent from the main body of essays. () Second is the issue of narrative ethics, the way narratives position or assume their agents and recipients in culturally specific ways, making narratology engage issues of cultural politics beyond the kinds of exclusively technical or formal analysis and classification with which it is still oen identified. () A third key direction for narratology engaged here is a turn towards cognitive science, as in Matthew M. Low’s exploratory paper on how its cognitive modelling through narratives can work as a resource for the actual restoration of the American prairie. e edited collection of essays is a staple form of research publication in the humanities. However, it is probably rare for someone other than a reviewer to read a collection from cover to cover. I would also wager that if a survey were done of citations from this kind of critical anthology, the introduction would oen rank among the most utilized of its essays. is will probably be the case with James and Morel’s fine ‘Introduction: Notes toward New Econarratologies’, which performs well the overall revisionist work ascribed to the whole collection. So many ecocritical essays, including several here, take the limited form of proselytizing for a contemporary text likely to be unknown to a reader. As James and Morel showcase, an introduction has the advantage of needing to be succinct and of being written last, as a summary overview, with less of the air of being a critic’s personal performance. D U T C Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. By L S. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. . x+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. is book joins a number of recent monographs that reflect a burgeoning academic interest in the work of long-neglected but quintessential modernist Mina Loy, notably Tara Prescott’s Poetic Salvage: Reading Mina Loy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, ) and Sarah Hayden’s Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ). Laura Scuriatti makes an original contribution to the field by exploring some of the less familiar material reprinted in Mina Loy: Stories and Essays, ed. by Sara Crangle (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ): work such as the ‘Mi & Lo’ fragments, and the essays ‘History of Religion and Eros’ and ‘e Library of the Sphinx’, the latter an imagined dialogue with Havelock Ellis that contains a characteristically piquant Loy observation: ‘the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman’ (p. ). Scuriatti also delves into the archive of unpublished material held at Yale, MLR, .,   commenting, for example, on the ‘Geronimo’ fragment, a portrayal of Giovanni Papini intended for the unfinished prose work ‘Esau Penfold’, and (more extensively ) on ‘Goy Israels’, a prose account of the family dysfunctions that Loy also explored in her long poem ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’. Rather than being consigned to the ‘marginal corner of modernist scholarship, reserved for those eccentric authors (mostly women) who did not fit the criteria of high modernism’, Scuriatti suggests that Loy should be seen as projecting a ‘critical gaze into the very heart of the modernist and avant-garde canon’ (p. ). She identifies Loy’s work as being informed by a tension between, on the one hand, the early modernist conception of ‘the artwork as a product of genius’ with its creator ‘endowed with a quasi-divine power of insight into reality’ and, on the other, a more ‘critical modernist conception, which destabilizes the categories of artwork, artist, and art as part of a broader critique of normative notions of gender, identity, and subjectivity’ (ibid.). Chapters are devoted to Loy’s interaction with radical Italian writing before the First World War, as influenced by Otto Weininger...