The Female Subject in Avant-Garde Poetry - Towards an Understanding of the Feminine in Mina Loy's and Dorothea Tanning's Poetry

Abstract

In this dissertation I will investigate the themes that comprise the realm of feminine experiences in Mina Loy’s and Dorothea Tanning’s avant-gardist poetry. My theoretic commencement will be Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine (i.e., feminine writing), alongside other concepts encountered in Cixous’s, as well as in Luce Irigaray’s and Julia Kristeva’s feminist theory. Noteworthy, I will deploy the Cixousian “feminine writing” in a thematic context, not from a linguistic perspective as previously used. I will claim that the variety of feminine themes employed in Loy’s and Tanning’s poetic oeuvre, such as female sexuality and libido, female corporeality, labour, marriage, as well as woman’s social and artistic identity, engender a Cixousian type of feminine writing. I will be conducting a close-reading analysis throughout which I aim to examine the particularities of the feminine poetic voice in Loy’s and respectively, Tanning’s, lyrics. I will also claim that their poems require a thorough analysis of the feminine themes in order to unravel the literary identity and the contribution Loy and Tanning had within a man-dominated avant-gardist tradition.