The Medium in Sight: Mina Loy’s Vision

Chapter five turns to Mina Loy’s unpublished novel Insel and its fascination with the invisible materialities of the late modern world, from spiritualist transmissions to television broadcasts. It opens by discussing Loy’s experiences with the modernist avant-garde and how they contextualize her highly visual manuscript generation process. From there, it considers where Insel’s understanding of modern mediumship is inextricable from the acute anxieties of broadcast media devices that accompanied late modern experiences of poverty, addiction, and mental illness–all of which characterize Loy’s historical relationship with the Surrealist movement. Situating Loy’s experimental writing alongside a strain of experimental women’s writing, chapter five considers how Loy’s novel captures the deluded and delirious experiences of modernity’s invisible materialities that were experienced at its margins. Turning finally to the material properties of Loy’s Insel manuscript, specifically its highly visual and fragmentary characteristics, the chapter concludes by revealing where Loy’s mediumistic form of composition allowed her to capture modernity's digital anxieties through the form of the novel.