Boxing Experiential Essence: Mina Loy's Vision of Pre-Mediation and Joseph Cornell's Shadow Box Art

This article investigates the analogy of Joseph Cornell's shadow box constructions and modernist poet Mina Loy's literary negotiation of pre-mediated meaning-making. Through close readings of Loy's posthumously published roman à clef Insel and her poems ‘Child Chanting’, ‘Property of Pigeons’, and ‘Moreover, the Moon — — —’ it shows how Loy's fascination with pre-mediated consciousness conceptionally aligns with Cornell's distinct box designs. The presented analyses reveal how Cornell's practice of arranging collected objects in cabinet-like boxes can illuminate Loy's aesthetic and figurative negotiation of an experiential moment that, similar to Charles Sanders Peirce's concept of Firstness, is best described as an unobjectified and unprocessed moment of experience. The presented study additionally demonstrates how Cornell's box designs and Loy's focus on pre-mediation are linked to their shared thematic interests in childhood, birds, the city, and astronomy. In doing so, this article presents a fresh outlook on Loy's epistemology in a modernist intermedial framework.