Jacinta Kelly
University Of New South Wales: Sydney
Mina Loy’s writing is in every sense an embodiment of movement; indeed, she isolates “stasis” as a critical obstacle to creative freedom and to the very apprehension of real experience. She articulates her position on movement in close dialogue with her readings of philosopher Henri Bergson, who critiques the tendency of the intellect to consider matter as “provisionally final” rather than in a state of flux, a tendency that is enabled by the encroachment of spatial terms upon conscious experience.
This essay examines Loy’s ‘Ladies in an Aviary’, a rarely discussed chapter in her unpublished novel The Child and the Parent, and her ‘Feminist Manifesto’—two texts that encapsulate what I contend is a career-long task of emancipating language from space.