ENG 486 - Navigating the Avant-Garde: Mina Loy & Her Nework

The emergence of the avant-garde in the early 20th century coincided with an explosion in magazines. Between 1885 and 1905 alone, 7500 new periodicals were established in the U. S., and thousands more in Great Britain. This seminar will explore the avant-garde as it circulated through magazines, ranging from experimental “little magazines” to “quality” monthlies and the mass-market glossies and pulps. Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared in The Dial in 1922, the same year that T. S. Eliot published “The Waste Land” in the same journal and James Joyce’s Ulysses was serialized in The Little Review. By the 1920s, avant-garde writers had become celebrities, featured in Vogue and Vanity Fair.

The central node the seminar’s inquiry will be Mina Loy-an artist, writer, feminist, inventor, and entrepreneur who moved in the circles of Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, and migrated among metropolitan centers of avant-garde activity, including Paris, Florence, Rome, New York, London, and Berlin, from the 1910s to the 1950s. Since Loy played a role in almost every major avant-garde movement, we will explore and map the avant-garde networks she navigated, using magazines to chart lines of connection and influence.

Just as the avant-garde began with an explosion of new print media, you will enter the field of new digital media, operating your own Davidson Domain and using WordPress, Google Docs and Google Drive, as well as mapping and timeline tools-skills you can market in job, fellowship, and employment applications, along with your experience working on a team. The seminar is a collaborative research & methods course with readings drawn from the field of periodical studies. You will find and select many of primary source readings, collaborate on a major research project, and contribute to the expansion of the web site Index of Modernist Magazines: a select bibliography. In addition, your digital scholarship may be published on the scholarly website, Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde (mina-loy.com).

Prerequisites & Notes
Desire to study the past, eagerness to equip yourself for the future, willingness to take risks, and team spirit.