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Archer, Shawna R.

English

2005

MA

Burgeoning from the author's own jarring experience encountering the way Mina Loy uses race in her novel, Insel, this thesis looks at the way that race functions in Loy's poetry and prose to both create and critique subjectivity. With Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, and the recent work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Jane Marcus informing this study, Loy's work is revealed to be both problematic and self-conscious. In Insel, two unnamed black female characters propel the development of the white main characters and provide the backdrop of powerlessness that inspires the white female narrator to question her own contribution to male power (while simultaneously acknowledging and then ignoring the power she gets from her racial position). In Loy's poetry, racist language and black vernacular are used to both establish poetic subjectivity and undercut it to further Loy's claim that true modem poetry came from the spaces in between languages and cultures.