Mina Loy and Her Networks

Paris – 8-9 September 2023 

Sorbonne Université & Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle

Organised by Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université) and Yasna Bozhkova (Sorbonne-Nouvelle), with funding from Sorbonne Université (Laboratoire VALE, ED IV, Fonds d’Intervention pour la Recherche), Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Laboratoire PRISMES) and the Société d’études modernistes (SEM).

Keynote speakers:

Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia

Laura Scuriatti, Bard College Berlin

Following on the heels of the recent modernist celebrations of 1922, 2023 marks the centenary of the publication of Mina Loy’s first collection of poems Lunar Baedecker, published in Paris by Robert McAlmon in his Contact collection. Loy’s work is now more topical than ever, and we are witnessing an apex in Loy scholarship, with the recent publication of Mary Ann Caws’ new biography, Mina Loy: Apology of Genius (Reaktion Books, 2022), and the long-awaited exhibition of her artworks, Strangeness is Inevitable, organized at Bowdoin College in the US (April 6–September 17, 2023), marking the apogee of ten years of steadily growing scholarly interest in Loy’s œuvre.

However, despite her growing global reputation and increasing recognition in the past decades, Loy’s work still remains more marginal in France than in the English-speaking world. This is somewhat paradoxical given that it was in France that Loy spent some of her most important years, first as an art student from 1900 to 1907 and then in the 1920s and the early 1930s. Her work of the period proved extremely prolific and versatile, not only as a poet, but also as an artist and gallery agent, as well as a critical theorist of modernism with her ekphrastic poems and essays on Stein, Joyce, Brancusi, Stravinsky, Cornell, and many others.

This conference aims to prompt new perspectives on Loy scholarship, paying particular attention to her networks and her presence in French artistic circles and to the French reception of her work.

CONFERENCE PROGRAM

DAY 1 Friday, 8 September, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

Venue: Maison de la Recherche (4 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris), Salle Claude Simon

9:30 – 11:00 Panel 1: Loy’s Late Work Chair: Benoît Tadié (Université Paris Nanterre)

• Sanja Bahun – University of Essex
  “Communal Cot: Mina Loy, the Homeless, and the Economy of Discomfort”
• Linda Kinnahan – Duquesne University
  “‘Shopping with Mina Loy’: The Streets and Flea-Market Economies”
• Alex Goody – Oxford Brookes University
  “Incipient Form and Inhuman Affect in Mina Loy’s Late Work”

Coffee break (11:00 – 11:30)

11:30 – 12:30 Keynote 1 Chair: Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université)

• Laura Scuriatti – Bard College Berlin
  “Mina Loy’s Ephemeral Collectivities, Interrupted Communities”

Lunch (12:30 – 2:00)

2:00 – 3:00 Panel 2: Poetry, Art and Craft Chair:  Sanja Bahun (University of Essex)

• Bowen Wang – Trinity College, Dublin
  “Portraying the Avant-Garde: Readymade and Painterly Abstraction in Mina Loy’s Art Poems”
• Amy Wells – Université de Caen Normandie
  “Mina Loy’s Parisian Lamps: A Case Study for Modernist Craftivism”

Coffee break (3:00 – 3:30)

3:30 – 4:30 Panel 3: New Approaches to Loy’s Visual Art Chair: Juliette Utard (Sorbonne Université)

• Anne Goodyear – Bowdoin College Museum of Art
  “Reinventing Mina Loy: The Dynamics of Her Visual Art”
• Jennifer Gross – Independent Art Historian and Curator
  “Truant of Heaven: The Artist Mina Loy”

Coffee break (4:30 – 5:00)

5:00 – 6:00 Panel 4: Loy’s Poetics of Location Chair: Hélène Aji (École normale supérieure, Paris)

• Karla Kelsey – Susquehanna University
  “A Childhood Composed in Paris”
• Mary Ann Caws – CUNY
  “Mina Loy and the Poetry of Place”

DAY 2: Saturday, 9 September, Sorbonne Université

Venue: Sorbonne (17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris), Amphi Chasles

9:30 – 11:00 Panel 5: Avant-garde Networks Chair: Linda Kinnahan (Duquesne University)

• Eva Isherwood-Wallace – Queen’s University Belfast
  “‘Conformed / to continent sculpture’: Mina Loy, Laura Riding and Sculptural Modernism”
• Johanna Pelikan – University of Hamburg
  “Ostracized with Gods in France – Mina Loy’s Parisian Network as Key to her Aesthetic Theory”
• Joanna Makowska – University of Warsaw
  “Poetics of Crisis: Docu-assemblages in the Works of Mina Loy and Kay Boyle”

Coffee break (11 – 11:30)

11:30 – 12:30 Panel 6: Editing and Networking Loy’s Poetry Chair: Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes University)

• Elise Ottavino – University of Western Ontario
  “Resisting the Baedeker: Mina Loy and the Feminist Side of Editing”
• Richard Aldersley – NYU
  “‘The Long Nightmare’: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose’ and Networking the Modernist Long Poem”

Lunch (12:30 – 2:30)

2:30 – 3:30 Panel 7: Mina Loy and Arthur Cravan Chair: Olivier Hercend (Université Paris Nanterre)

• Jennifer Ashby – European University Institute
  “‘My fatal plurality!’: Mina Loy, Arthur Cravan, and the Remains of Love”
• Charlotte Estrade – Université Paris-Nanterre
  “‘I swear to you there is something massive and eternal in me’: Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy”

Translating Loy (3:30-4-00) Chair: Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université)

• Olivier Apert – Mina Loy’s French translator, “Mina Loy : comment parler d’elle pour s’en rapprocher davantage”

Coffee break (4:00 – 4:30)

4:30 – 5:30 Keynote 2: Chair: Yasna Bozhkova (Université Paris Nanterre)

• Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, “Mina Loy, Modernism, and the Archive”

Optional walking tour: Mina Loy’s Paris