Mina Loy's Critical Modernism

In Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism, Laura Scuriatti argues that Loy’s corpus of works produces a kind of “critical” modernism, making the case that Loy’s corpus exhibits a skeptical, detached attitude toward its own simultaneous celebration and criticism of modernist aesthetic paradigms. Most modernist works are self-reflexive in this regard, but Loy’s corpus creates for itself a space of dis-affiliation, which combines critique with self-critique, rather than forging a space of rebellion and antagonism. Scuriatti investigates the notions of the masterpiece and the sacred art object, especially in their relation to the market; the figure of the author and the value of authorship; the embattled relationship between art and politics; the artwork's relationship to national language, identity and rootlessness. Scuriatti provides a new, in-depth investigation of specific aspects of the Florentine and Italian context in particular, which have so far been neglected by scholarship. Specifically, attention is devoted to the Florentine avant-garde journal Lacerba, and to the works of Giovanni Papini, Ada Negri and Enif Robert. The volume presents new insights into Loy’s feminism and argues that her texts respond to the rewriting of Otto Weininger’s then widely influential theories in the magazine Lacerba. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s, Luisa Muraro’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s claims, this study also rethinks the concept of eccentricity, conceived not as “aberrant”, but as consciously anti-normative, anti-idealistic and self-critical, in relation to modernist aesthetics. It shows that Loy’s texts present dialogic, “narratable,” “eccentric” selves and subjectivities, which create uncomfortable critical spaces within modernism as a broad movement.