Resource: Digital Mina Loy

Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is a beautiful digital resource designed and maintained by Suzanne Churchill and Andrew Rikard of Davidson College, and Susan Rosenbaum of the University of Georgia.  The site has a number of valuable features that might facilitate the teaching not only of Loy, but of the avant-garde more broadly.

The site offers a “Narrative” section, with five chapters:  “Enter the Avant-Garde,” “Futurist Plays,” “Dada Prose,” “Surreal Scene,” and “No Man’s Land.”  These well-researched and engaging multimedia chapters situate Loy’s work within a larger cultural and aesthetic context.  Here readers will find discussion of plays like The Pamperers alongside other artifacts of Futurism, and consideration of Loy’s fiction in conversation with the art of Marcel Duchamp.

Churchill, Rikard, and Rosenbaum also provide bios with a gallery of images; an interactive timeline of Loy’s life and work; and an archive of Loy manuscripts built using Omeka.  A manifesto positions this work within digital humanities and the kinds of close reading it can facilitate.  Modeled on Blast, the manifesto calls for doing “close reading better:  more informed, less closed.”  I recommend scholars and teachers of modernism spend some quality time immersed in this rich and well-designed site.