Journal Article

'The dance of the intelligence': Dancing bodies in Mina Loy

Abstract

Mina Loy’s engagement with dance in her writings exemplifies how a woman writer could use this corporeal art as a means to articulate a feminist sensibility. In a period when dance was undergoing similar seismic shifts to those transforming the written and visual arts, Loy drew on ballet and modern dance, and their expressive kinaesthetics, to examine the gender politics of the dancing body and explore the performative energies of the written word. This article examines Loy’s published and unpublished work, from early poems on Italian futurism to her long poem on Isadora Duncan, and the dancing that inspired them. It argues that Loy draws on dance to interrogate and experiment with the way meaning is made with the body and how the body can be part of the meanings of language.

Attached files

Authors

Goody, Alex

Oxford Brookes departments

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences\Department of English and Modern Languages

Dates

Year of publication: 2018
Date of RADAR deposit: 2016-09-13

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

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Related resources

This RADAR resource is the Accepted Manuscript of "The dance of the intelligence"? Dancing bodies in Mina Loy