ELIT 48C Class #17

AGENDA Author Introduction:

Mina Loy Exam #1

Author Introduction: Mina Loy 1882–1966Visual Artist and Poet

Although Mina Loy was born in England, she did much of her work in Paris, Florence, and New York City, where her beauty and outlandish behavior shone at the center of multiple avant-garde circles. The unconventional vocabulary and syntax of Loy’s poems and their scornful treatment of love and other subjects can puzzle and offend, but no reader can question the work’s originality nor the poet’s fierce intelligence.

Neglect of Loy's poetry has lent qualified support to revisionist claims that leading male modernists like T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Joyce defined modernism so as to marginalize writers whose poetics and politics threatened their own largely conservative stance.

However, Eliot and Pound praised Loy's work. High modernist champions of technical innovation and intellectual rigor could not accuse Loy of formal conservatism or sentimentality.

Literary historians may have marginalized Loy by making her a modernist icon, woman-as-Dada, while relegating her writing to avant-garde obscurity; but equally relevant is Loy's lessened attention to her poetry in later life.

Renewed interest in her poetry belongs to the recovery of the neglected, multiple aspects of early modernism. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) Stein, whom Loy praised as "Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary," offers a definitive tribute to Loy's artistic vision. Recalling Loy's first husband's plea that she punctuate the long sentences without commas in The Making of Americans (1925), Stein notes that "Mina Loy . . . was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand."

The Exam You have the entire period

to take the exam Please read the questions

thoroughly Please answer the

questions carefully Bring your test paper to the

front when you finish.

Read: Mina Loy 295-96 “Parturition” 296-99 Post #16: Answer one of the following prompts:1. QHQ on the “Parturition”2. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with

Loy’s Manifesto.3. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with

one critical theory4. Discuss “Parturition” in conjunction with

American Dream.