The satirical vision of Mina Loy

This thesis explores the relationship between satire and visionary experience in the poetry and plays of Mina Loy. Increasingly, scholars of the Modernist period recognize Loy as a significant feminist thinker and satirist, but few attempt to explain the idiosyncracies of her feminism or analyze her distinctive approach to satire. Moreover, many scholars disregard the persistent mystical strain in Loy's writings, which derives from her enduring interest in Henri Bergson's vitalism, Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science, and her friend Roberto Assagioli's psychosynthesis. Bergson's notion of creative evolution and his definition of the comic as a response to "mechanical inelasticity" feature prominently in Loy's satirical poems, which target those who limit their spiritual potential by devoting themselves to a particular ideology. Yet, Loy's satirical portraits, unlike those of her Modernist contemporaries, employ a complex, ambivalent irony and oscillate between praise and mockery of their subjects.;Loy's mystical proclivities crucially inform her poetics of satire. Her abstract diction, disjunctive syntax, and typographical experiments offer a literary equivalent of Assagioli's "disidentification" technique of disrupting conventional way of perceiving reality in order to encourage spiritual evolution. In its response to the "crisis in consciousness" she declared in 1913's "Aphorisms on Futurism," her entire body of work reveals a consistency of purpose overlooked by those concerned largely with Loy's sex-war poems of the 1910s.;Keywords: Mina Loy, satire, irony, feminism, Futurism, mysticism, Henri Bergson, F. T. Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Roberto Assagioli.