Fragmented Bodies and Psyches in Mina Loy's "Lions' Jaws" and Surreal Scene

Karabulut T.

Mapping Mina Loy Studies in 2023, Leicester, İngiltere, 4 - 05 Ağustos 2023, (Özet Bildiri)

  • Yayın Türü: Bildiri / Özet Bildiri
  • Basıldığı Şehir: Leicester
  • Basıldığı Ülke: İngiltere
  • Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Fragmented Bodies and Psyches in Mina Loy’s “Lions’ Jaws” and Surreal Scene 

            Produced and published in the avant-garde and modernist coteries, British poet, artist and feminist Mina Loy stands out as a revolutionary female figure shedding light on visual and literary concerns of the early modernist period. Loy’s works often revolve around striking themes, such as female body and mind, motherhood, gender, sexuality and human consciousness. Her poems feature unusual form and typography, breaking the poetic traditions of the era and her artworks maintain an eclectic attitude mirroring Futurist, Dadaist and Surrealist perspectives. This paper, avoiding biographical accounts and the author’s life experiences and with reference to semiotic, surrealist and intertextual ideas and theories, intends to investigate how Loy’s visual and textual narrators, in her poem “Lions’ Jaws” (1920) and her artwork Surreal Scene (1930), multiply into different personas bodily and mentally and merge again to reconstruct a new identity. While “Lions’ Jaws” shows the complex relations between the narrators and their engagement with Futurism and Feminism through the anagrammatical characters they represent, Surreal Scene, a multi-layered composition of three-dimensional objects scattered around a nude female image, illustrates the states of transformations and entrapments of the female image. This paper performatively explores the textual and visual signs depicting the fragmented and reassembling bodies and psyches in these works. Thus, I would argue that Loy’s narrators evolve throughout the text at corporeal, psychic and intellectual levels, which leads to female identity reformation and feminine creativity, challenging stereotypical femininity and male-dominant traditions.