Conferences & Calls
Please contact the webmaster with info on upcoming Lawrence related conferences, panels, and calls for papers. Your assistance is appreciated in helping to keep these notices up-to-date. Past MLA Lawrence session paper titles are now archived on our website as well as information regarding past International Lawrence Conferences.
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Conference Announcements |
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NEMLA 2027 What exactly is nostalgia? Do we tend to idealize events of the past simply because they are completed and unchangeable while the present is in flux and the future is unknown? How much do we distort the past in order to create a positive image of it? While the function of memory is crucial for what D.W. Winnicott calls “continuity of being” or a consistent sense of identity, how does a nostalgic view of the past affect our sense of self if memory is subject to distortion? D.H. Lawrence was ambivalent about nostalgia. He evokes the biblical story of Lot’s wife in the poem “She Looks Back” and in the novel Aaron’s Rod to express the dangers of looking back. In his own life, although he himself was at times prone to nostalgia, he was more often skeptical about returning to the past: “I feel at once a devouring nostalgia and an infinite repulsion,” he wrote in an essay about returning to his hometown in the autumn of 1926 (LEA 15). Partly because he loathed aspects of the industrialized modern world he lived in and longed for what he considered to be a more halcyon bygone era, Lawrence explored various facets of nostalgia in his writing.In his creative work, Lawrence could be dismissive of nostalgia, as we see with the evocation of Lot’s wife, whose looking back resulted in her being turned into a pillar of salt. But he could also describe nostalgia as an intense longing, as, for example, in the novel Kangaroo: “Torture of nostalgia. He craved to be back, his soul was there” (K 248). Is nostalgia most attractive in Lawrence’s work when the thread of continuity of being is frayed by present events and a return to the past, literal or imaginative, promises a mending of that thread? Is there a cultural nostalgia that Lawrence participated in, one based on the Christian concept of humanity’s lost paradise in the mythical past? For its 2027 NEMLA panel in Newport, RI, (March 6-9, 2027) the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers that may examine Lawrence’s exploration of nostalgia in any genre and from any angle. Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to the official NEMLA submission portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22628. Please also send a notice of submission and a brief bio to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca. The deadline for submission is September 30, 2026.
17th International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Aix-Marseille 02-08 July 2028 Lawrence and the Mediterranean
Co-sponsored by the English Department of Aix-Marseille University, France, the English Department of Paris Nanterre University, France and the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America
Conference Dates: 02-08 July 2028 (Sunday-Saturday)
Conference Site: Aix-en-Provence, France (Aix-Marseille University)
Conference organizers: Fiona Fleming (Paris-Nanterre University), Tim Gupwell (Paul Valéry Montpellier University) and Nicolas P. Boileau (Aix-Marseille University)
Call for Papers
“I am thinking of Lawrence here. He worshipped the sun. Light and tuberculosis: these are the two things Lawrence and Spinoza have in common” (Deleuze, Lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes)
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
(The Ship of Death, D. H. Lawrence)
D. H. Lawrence, great lover of the sun, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44, is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers of the Twentieth Century, and this conference seeks to revisit the final months of his life (1885-1930) in the south of France, and in the Mediterranean in general—addressing the tensions of his life in Italy, Spain and Switzerland, his admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne, his interest in light and colours—and the debilitating effects of illness. We seek to work on his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry (particularly in these later years), and to reassess the not unambiguous impression made upon him and his writings by the Mediterranean.
In October 1928, Lawrence and Frieda had left Baden-Baden in Germany for the south of France and first stayed in Le Lavandou, a village east of Marseilles and Toulon, travelling to the island Port Cros before moving to Bandol and ultimately to Vence where he finally passed away in March 1930. The Mediterranean had of course been a source of enchantment and inspiration much earlier in Lawrence’s life, during his stays in Sicily, Sardinia and the north-western coast of Italy, but it seems to have held an even greater appeal during the last two years of his life in France, after cold weather and dull scenery had severely damaged his health and state of mind. On the 27th of September 1929 he wrote to Earl Brewster:
We arrived Monday evening – three days ago. It seemed very lovely – so full of light and a certain newness. I am already much better. In Germany I felt I should certainly die – awful – It was psychic depression. The Germans are in an awful state, inwardly – but horrible. I feel that nothing will ever again take me north of Lyon. I dread and hate the north, it is full of death and the most grisly disappointment. I feel already nearly myself again here – the sun and sea, the great light, and the natural people. I can breathe. In the north, I can’t breathe. (Letters 7, 494)
Lawrence sometimes seems to associate the natural with the sun and with life (the Mediterranean peoples), whereas ego-bound selves (from the north) are linked to death and unhealthiness. Previous collective volumes, Windows to the Sun (Ed. Ingersoll & Hyde), Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun (Ed. Ceramella), looked at Lawrence’s lifelong fascination with the sun. We propose to build on these earlier contributions, looking in depth at the relationship between the sun and healthiness, or illness.
In his article ‘The Real Thing’ Lawrence wrote, shortly before his death from tuberculosis: ‘what makes life good to me is the sense that, even if I am sick and ill, I am alive, alive to the depths of my soul, and in touch somewhere, in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos. Somehow my life draws strength from the depths of the universe’ (LEA 310). Can the non-human world, in other words, be seen as a source of recovery? The great importance of the sun for Lawrence is obvious in his last pieces of writing such as the non-fictional ‘Apocalypse’, the critical review ‘Chaos in Poetry’, or short stories like ‘The Man who Died’ (1929), or ‘Sun’ (revised in 1928), in which the doctor says: ‘TAKE HER AWAY, into the sun’. Indeed, the sun always seems to stand for something far greater in Lawrence’s writings, particularly Lawrence’s later writings. In ‘Making Pictures’ he asserts that ‘the divine is not only good, it is all things’, and claims that the divine may be seen in natural objects (LEA 229).
On the other hand, one recurring complaint of Lawrence’s during his stays on the French Riviera was that the coast was being too built-up and becoming ‘artificial’ with the intrusive ‘human-all-too-human’ world repeatedly casting a shadow upon the magnificence of the Mediterranean: ‘They are just beginning to mess this coast up – but the messing seems to proceed rapidly, once it starts. Little villas “tout confort” – yes, my word. Very comforting to the eye!’ (Letters 7, 588). We also wish to look at this constant tension in Lawrence’s writings between the objectionable intrusiveness of modern man, and the cosmos as a source of renewal, or even as a force for healing from the unhealthy influences of the modern world. Other possible readings might pursue either the kind of psycho-geographic approach employed by Terry Gifford in his recent book D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (2023), in which he argues that Lawrence’s writing in Sea and Sardinia can be seen as an exploration of a more symbiotic, bidirectional relationship between writer and place, or it might draw on the developing field of the ‘Blue Humanities’, such as in Gifford’s article in the D. H. Lawrence Review (46.1.2) on the short story ‘The Flying Fish’, written shortly after Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Finally, this conference will also look at Lawrence’s relationship with that famous denizen of Aix-en-Provence Cézanne, to whom Lawrence had unsurprisingly turned towards the end of 1928, discussing him (and other painters) in the remarkable ‘Introduction to these Paintings’. For Lawrence, unlike the Impressionist painters, this flight into light is merely illusory, meaningless, an escape ‘into the grand néant, the great nowhere’ (LEA 197), and the importance of the Mediterranean lies elsewhere. Lawrence suggests that Cézanne was engaged in a heroic struggle (LEA 204) between the ready-made clichés of the man-made world and a deeper ‘naïve Mediterranean sense’ of the truth or reality of the cosmos: ‘in him was the little flame of life where he felt things to be true’ (LEA 205).
Conference Theme
The conference theme seeks to explore these tensions in Lawrence’s earlier as well as later works, and invites papers on any aspect of Lawrence’s works that is concerned with the constant attention to life.
Possible themes may include the following, although these are not exhaustive, and we also welcome other approaches and any new work on Lawrence:
Individual paper submissions: Abstracts of about no more than 400 words together with a proposed title and a short biobibliography should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026
Panel proposals: We welcome suggestions for specific panels. A title, a list of contributors together with their affiliations (no more than 4), a list of proposed abstracts (400 words max), and short biobibliograpies should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026
MLA 2026 Toronto, ON (8–11 January 2026) D. H. LAWRENCE AND ANIMALS
Animals serve important—and importantly distinct—functions in D. H. Lawrence’s literary, philosophical, critical, political, and private writings. In The White Peacock (1911), for instance, George Saxton drowns an injured cat in front of Cyril and Lettie Beardsall and thus stages a thematic confrontation between the practical business of managing a farm and an ethics one might interpret either as posthumanist or as bourgeois (i.e., alienated from labor and the cruel realities of material life). Where else does Lawrence stage this or variations of this confrontation? And what responses does he and his writings offer to them? What do we make of the value he sometimes associates with animal life—free of yet prey to the mechanistic decay of modernity—and moments where he draws on specific animals (beetles, for instance) to articulate anxieties or worries (about sex and sexuality, for instance)? Where might one situate Lawrence’s thought and art with respect to the larger corpus of modernism’s engagement with animals and the primitive, savage, and/or inhumane/nonhuman? For its 2026 MLA panel in Toronto, ON (January 8–11, 2026), the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers from any perspective on any aspect of Lawrence and animals: e.g., representations of animals across his literary work, Lawrence’s theorization of human-animal difference, and his works’ intersections with developments in the field of animal studies. Abstracts of 250–300 words and a brief bio should be sent to Benjamin D. Hagen at Benjamin.Hagen@usd.edu by Monday, March 17, 2025.
39th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE 16, 17, 18 April 2026 Dramatic Lawrence
It was the end of Amleto, and I was glad. But I loved the theatre, I loved to look down on the peasants, who were so absorbed. At the end of the scenes the men pushed back their black hats, and rubbed their hair across their brows with a pleased, excited movement. And the women stirred in their seats. (Twilight in Italy 150)
Among both readers and scholars, D. H. Lawrence’s plays have drawn less attention than his novels and poems. Three of his plays were published during his lifetime: The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (1914), Touch and Go (1920) and David (1926). Others were posthumously published, among which A Collier’s Friday Night (1934) and much later The Daughter-in-Law (1965). Productions of his plays were quite rare till the end of the 1960s, when Peter Gill, for the Royal Court Theatre, successfully staged A Collier’s Friday Night and soon after The Daughter-in-Law for the first time. With an acute sense of realism, Lawrence’s plays produce scenes of the coal-mining community performed by characters (and actors) whose broad Midland dialect vividly recreates the sounds and atmosphere of this peculiar working-class. The ambition of our conference this year is to explore the plays written by Lawrence and examine the various productions that have been performed for almost a century. But beyond the study of his plays, we would also like to invite reflections on the role and place of drama in his fiction, poetry, essays and letters. The vivid and authentic cues in his plays also noticeably characterize countless dialogues in his fiction, likewise foregrounding language no longer on stage but on the page, hence reproducing fictional dramatic scenes (like in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” for instance) or soliloquies, as when Birkin “Hamletises, and it seems a lie”. Some poems too, such as “Whether or Not” for instance, read as dramatic pieces much in keeping with the realistic ambition of Lawrence’s plays. In his novels, fictional characters also happen to stage performances, like Hermione who in “Breadalby” famously proposes the idea of a play: props are promptly produced and “Naomi and Ruth and Orpah” materialize on the improvised stage in the drawing-room. The description of the fictional spectators’ reaction may lead us to reflections on notions like the creation (and power) of illusion and the suspension of disbelief. Other characters perform more spontaneously (like Connie dancing in the rain with Mellors as a spectator), or on the contrary read flatly (Clifford, “rusty now”, reads Racine to Connie: “Of the Racine she heard not one syllable”). This fictional staging of performance will thus be addressed, interrogating the role of each character, whether actor, actress, spectator, stage director, or even playwright – Michaelis writes plays and “had seized upon Clifford as the central figure for” one of them, turning the latter into a ridiculed “hero”. As a traveller, spectator of other cultures, Lawrence depicts scenes of ethnological and ritual gathering almost as performances, notably in The Plumed Serpent, that lead him to address the issue of man’s position in Nature, of the individual and society. In Italy, Lawrence evokes his attending a performance of Ibsen’s Ghosts and describes in detail both what goes on on stage and among the Italian spectators (Twilight in Italy). Amleto is another play he attends, which leads Lawrence to a long reflexive digression on the meaning of Shakespeare’s play and the “great half-truth” of the Renaissance about the Infinite. Hamlet also haunts several of Lawrence’s poems, like “The Ship of Death”, “Manifesto”, “Sleep” or “Ballad of another Ophelia”, in which the poet uses, subverts and literally plays with the words and iambic beat of the Shakespearian figures, and debunks their assertive positions – intertextual strategies that somehow dramatize the poems. The study of all these aspects will, we hope, lead us to measure the various dramatic qualities of Lawrence’s oeuvre. We invite reflections on the following non-exhaustive list of themes: · Lawrence as a playwright · Productions of Lawrence’s plays · Play-acting and performances in Lawrence’s fiction · Dramatic intertexts · Shakespeare in Lawrence’s work · Lawrence on drama · Lawrence as a spectator; spectators in Lawrence’s work
The deadline for proposals is 25 October 2025. Priority will be given to proposals received before the deadline, but we will continue to accept proposals until 31 October 2025. Please send a 300-word abstract and a biographical note to Fiona Fleming f.fleming@parisnanterre.fr and Elise Brault-Dreux braultel@wanadoo.fr
Organizing Committee: Fiona Fleming, Elise Brault-Dreux. Conference Fee: 80 euros Link to our journal Etudes Lawrenciennes http://lawrence.revues.org/.
NEMLA 2026 March 5-8, 2026. Pittsburgh, PA D.H. Lawrence and Class In his final novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D.H. Lawrence imagines the wife of a minor aristocrat falling in love with her husband’s gamekeeper. He wrote the novel soon after his return to Italy from what was to be his last visit to his home region in England, which was then in the midst of industrial strife and class conflict. So the impetus for the novel may well have been events which concentrated Lawrence’s mind on social class. However, the cross-class liaison in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is only one of many inter-class dealings in Lawrence’s work, clashes and crossings that reflect his own mixed-class upbringing. His early life featured a mother with middle-class aspirations and a barely literate father proudly of the working class, a mixture memorably dramatized in Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s own class loyalties shifted over the years as his understanding of his parents deepened and his interest in the broader social issues at stake increased, but, because he was so familiar with the values and mores of both classes, he was able to produce some of the most nuanced writing about class since Dickens. Such writing encompassed his poetry, fiction, plays, and essays. It is a constant concern. For its 2026 NEMLA panel in Pittsburgh, PA, (March 5-8, 2026) the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers that may examine Lawrence’s exploration of class in any genre and from any angle, but those submitting proposals may wish to focus on one or more of the following: - The nature of the cross-class relationships in Lawrence’s fiction (e.g. in The Lost Girl, The Virgin and the Gipsy, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and numerous short stories including “Daughters of the Vicar”) - The expression of class consciousness in poems such as “Finding your level,” “Climbing Up,” “Up he goes! –,” “Prestige,” and “Red-herring” - The dramatic exposition of class in plays such as A Collier’s Friday Night and Touch and Go - How criticism of Lawrence’s work has dealt with the issue of Lawrence and class since F.R. Leavis’s chapter “Lawrence and Class” in his 1955 book D.H. Lawrence: Novelist - How Lawrence’s comments on class in his non-fictional prose (e.g. “Getting On,” “Which Class I Belong To,” “Myself Revealed”) relate to the fictional expression of class - How does Lawrence’s interest in class interact with his concerns on individual development and relationships? - There are many examples in the British novel of cross-class relationships between an upper-class man and a lower-class woman (e.g. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles) which sometimes end badly for the woman. How do we account for Lawrence’s turning that convention on its head in several respects, where a higher-class woman finds salvation with a lower-class man? - How does Lawrence’s representation of class relate to evolving conceptions of class identity or to the representations of class in the work of other writers? Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to the official NEMLA submission portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21634. Please also send a notice of submission and a brief bio to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca. The deadline for submission is Friday, September 26, 2025.
 SAMLA CFP proposal #2 D. H. Lawrence: Elitist? The aristocratic protagonist of Lawrence’s “The Ladybird” (1923) contracts a mystical marriage with a Bohemian count. The count’s ideas make him a stand-in for Lawrence. The count predicts, and welcomes, more destruction of the social order than even the Great War brought about. Why does Lawrence assign this spokesman, and the woman who pledges fidelity to him, an aristocratic status? Is there an inveterate elitism in Lawrence and his work? Adam Parkes’s Modernism and the Aristocracy (1923) has recently deliberated the latter question. For a further deliberation of Lawrentian elitism the D. H. Lawrence Society of North America seeks papers for a 2024 SAMLA session about this topic. Contradictions abound in Lawrence. As Parkes makes clear, if there is an elitist streak in Lawrence, there is also an opposite, egalitarian commitment. Lawrence struggles, Parkes says, “to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of the hereditary aristocracy” and to model “a supply of people intelligent and virtuous enough to run a genuine democracy.” Nevertheless, that “supply of people” suggests another undemocratic elite grouping: an intellectual aristocracy. How does Lawrence represent such contradictions, or ignore, or exploit, or resolve them? Related questions might include: What previously unseen aspects of Lawrence’s work are made visible by considering elitism’s place in it? What present-day classroom challenges arise if one is teaching students about the elitism that Lawrence courts? Proposed papers in response to this call must provide an abstract of 200 words and a short cv. The deadline for submission of proposals has been extended to July 31, 2024. They are to be sent to Professor Robert L. Caserio at rlc25@psu.edu
Call for Papers: 16th International D.H. Lawrence Conference: Lawrence in México: Travel, Translation, and Transcultural Representation Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, August 11-15, 2025 In March 1923, D.H. Lawrence arrived in Mexico City; two months later, he wrote from Lake Chapala to his mother-in-law: “I always had the idea of writing a novel here in America. In the U.S. I could do nothing. But I think here it will go well.” The novel in question was The Plumed Serpent, in which Lawrence grapples with various emotions concerning the difficulty of a functional blending of multiple cultures – here, white European and North American people with indigenous Mexicans and those of European descent. The results are notoriously mixed and problematic. The Mexico that Lawrence visited and about which he wrote was post-revolutionary, a nation concentrating on reestablishing its economic ties with the U.S. as well as Britain, France, and Germany. This convulsive period of Mexico’s history also saw appeals to democratization, social rights, and the value of a pre-Hispanic past and of native cultures. Lawrence witnessed the strong ambivalence, contrasts, and contradictions of this panorama, but he often misunderstood and misrepresented what he saw. It is this latter reality – the problems inherent in intercultural representation and the pervasiveness of these issues from Lawrence’s time to our own, and their lasting impact on literary criticism and translation – that lie at the core of the theme for the proposed 16th International D. H. Lawrence Conference in Mexico City. As international Lawrence scholars come together in Mexico City in August 2025, we expect to engage with these topics from many angles and in many of Lawrence’s works. Lawrence and Mexico, and Lawrence and the Americas, may be principal foci of the conference, but Lawrence scholars with a range of interests are welcome to participate and engage with the conference theme from vantages relevant to their own work. Suggested topics for papers include the following:
Send an abstract in English or Spanish of 250-300 words to Prof. Adam Parkes (University of Georgia, USA) at aparkes@uga.edu. Deadline: Extended to August 30, 2024. Abstracts will be reviewed by an international academic program committee; results will be communicated by the end of July. DHLSNA Organizing Committee: Julianne Newmark, Ben Hagen, Emma Julieta Barreiro, and Adam Parkes UNAM (ENALLT and FFyL) Organizing Committee: MLA 2025 New Orleans, LA (Jan. 9-12, 2025) STRANGER ENCOUNTERS: D.H. LAWRENCE AND THE FOREIGN Strangers and the foreign play an important role in Lawrence’s body of work and life, whether he is coming to terms with foreign customs in his travel sketches or bringing a foreign character into the fabric of his fiction to pointed effect – the Polish Lydia Lensky in The Rainbow comes immediately to mind – or communicating with his German mother-in-law in his letters. In several of Lawrence’s poems about encounters with animals that evoke negative human emotions – a bat, for example – the speaker at first reacts negatively to the strangeness of the creature, but eventually must come to terms with its otherness. In the essay “The Reality of Peace,” Lawrence suggests that snakes represent something inside of us that we would rather not recognize. This engagement with the foreign for someone who is in many ways a quintessentially English writer is remarkable. How do we account for it? For its 2025 MLA panel in New Orleans, January 9-12, 2025, the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers from any perspective on any aspect of Lawrence’s engagement with strangeness, strangers, and the foreign in any genre, including the concept of otherness. Abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief curriculum vitae should be sent to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca Deadline has been extended to March 31, 2024 It is not too late to submit an abstract!
37th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE (Paris France) 25-27 April 2024 Acoustic Awareness in D. H. Lawrence’s Work Université Paris Nanterre
Sounds partake of the fabric of life. Relatively intense, sounds are omnipresent in one’s immediate environment. But they can also reactivate memories from the past or be remembered, echoing in one’s mind or private ear. They may furthermore announce something coming, like a promise or an ominous threat. Paying special attention to the frequent evocation of sounds and noises in Lawrence’s writings, the conference will examine how he re-creates the soundscape of his times and the sounds of his characters’ environment, thus producing a resounding textual material. Hearing is a spatial experience: sounds deploy themselves in space where the untouchable and invisible soundwaves vibrate. We will study how Lawrence’s novels and poems literally provide spaces for vibrations, or repetitions of sounds, like for instance the drums that vibrate throughout The Plumed Serpent. But within the space and time of a novel, a poem, an essay or a letter, Lawrence also echoes the context of the period he describes – turning parts of his work into sound archives: the dissonance of booming industrialisation, the noise of urbanisation, of locomotives, engines, new machines, all these sounds convey the cultural and political atmosphere of the early 20th century. Some places are particularly resonant, like churches or cathedrals whose peculiar acoustics Lawrence repeatedly evokes and by which he foregrounds the possible metaphysical dimension of sounds. Sounds thus reveal the spirit of time and place, and this is made all the more conspicuous when Lawrence travels to remote areas, as in Mornings in Mexico where one hears “the sound of strangers’ voices,” or where foreign languages or even local dialect disturb or add piquancy to human interaction. In Kangaroo, Richard Somers is perturbed by the Australians’ odd tendency to reduce words to “just a sound”. Music as well, either performed with instruments or sung, plays a fundamental part in the various cultural soundscapes explored by Lawrence. If human beings speak noisily – and Lawrence reproduces a wide range of voices –, they are also physically noisy, beyond words: coughs, snores, hiccupping, choking throats, laughter, heart beats, sexual intercourse, bodily contact, cries, boisterous children, and all sorts of shrieks. “The moaning cry of the woman in labour” (The Rainbow) makes birth as noisy as the agony of the dying (like the “wha-a-a-ah” of Gerald’s father). Beyond the noises produced by human beings and their man-made civilisation, Lawrence’s oeuvre resounds with the echoes of Nature. The sea, the wind, the weather are relentlessly noisy. Animals regularly cough and neigh, or shout, their noises are set against those of machines, of human beings, or are used metaphorically to depict the noises of the latter. These sounds must be in part analysed as clues to Lawrence’s complex epistemological apprehension of fauna, flora, cosmos, and of the world in general. For, quite regularly in his work, “to sound” is a metonymy for the attempt to define what is not wholly graspable: “sounded as if,” “sounded like,” “it sounded impersonal”, “they sounded absorbed….” etc. Not wholly seizing the true nature of things, Lawrence relies on how things sound to get closer to a form of apprehension. An inquiry into the question of sound and sounds necessarily involves the issue of silence, as it is described in or reproduced by the text: the silence of Nature, of people, blanks and breaks in conversations, speechlessness, etc. How can silence be interpreted, suggested, hinted at? Does it express void, fear, loss, pain, suffocation, peacefulness, reticence? Is it natural and spontaneous or forced? If representing silence with words is somewhat ironical, for words emerge from silence and are therefore a modulation of the silence, another related paradox actually arises as soon as we take acoustics as an object of analysis in literature, since the written text is by nature silent. Participants are therefore invited to analyse how the text is made sonorous when read, and in the process (whether read aloud or in one’s mind) how the textual material is thus made to resonate. This will involve reflections addressing the characters’ voices and the analysis of the prosody, the rhythm, the thickness of the signifiers that produce sounds. For Lawrence makes language vibrate, by “slightly modified repetitions” (WL), by paronomasia, alliterations and assonances, by distortions or, for instance, by making regular use of onomatopoeia that plug the reader’s ear directly to the sound evoked. We invite reflection on the following, non-exhaustive list of themes:
A few bibliographic references:
The deadline for proposals is 10 November 2023. Priority will be given to proposals received before the deadline, but we will continue to accept proposals until 15 December 2023. Please send a 300-word abstract and a biographical note to Fiona Fleming f.fleming@parisnanterre.fr and Elise Brault-Dreux braultel@wanadoo.fr Organizing Committee: Fiona Fleming, Elise Brault-Dreux, Ginette Roy. Conference Fee: 80 euros Link to our journal Etudes Lawrenciennes http://lawrence.revues.org/
MLA 2024 Philadelphia, PA (Jan. 4-7, 2024) Proposed Joint Panel JOYS AND SORROWS OF ATTACHMENT: DICKENS AND LAWRENCE In Dickens’s figures, cravings for attachment motivate the forward drive of complex relations; in Lawrence’s figures, cravings for separation are the narrative motor. How might new scrutiny of the drama of attachments and separations enrich critical analysis of Dickens and Lawrence? Along those lines, how might fresh comparative attention to those writers illuminate the period differences that rightly or wrongly separate them and their professional critics too? Those questions are made more relevant by current interest in attachment theory as it affects ordinary life and ideas of well-being. Moreover, attachment theory plays a major part in attempts to define the nature of literature and of readers’ responses to artworks. To explore all the phenomena at issue – formalist, psychological, aesthetic – we are proposing a joint panel that will formulate Dickensian and Lawrentian contributions to attachment theory, and attachment theory’s possible contributions to Dickens and Lawrence studies. Papers dealing with both authors are especially welcome. Abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief curriculum vitae should be sent to Robert L. Caserio at rlc25@psu.edu by Sunday, March 19, 2023.
MLA 2024 Philadelphia, PA (Jan. 4-7, 2024) D.H. LAWRENCE AND AFFECT/EMOTIONS/FEELINGS In his essay “The Novel and the Feelings,” Lawrence laments the fact that, in his belief, “we are hopelessly uneducated in ourselves” and that in “the dark continent of my self, I have a whole stormy chaos of ‘feelings’” (STH 201-02). His suggestion is for the reader to listen in to “the low, calling cries” of characters in novels “as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny” (STH 205). Clearly, Lawrence was highly interested in exploring human emotions and in exploring his own often volatile feelings. He does that with great skill and intensity in much of his writing of whatever genre. For its 2024 MLA panel in Philadelphia, January 4-7, 2024, the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers from any theoretical perspective, including affect theory, on any aspect of Lawrence’s engagement with emotions. Abstracts of 250-300 words and a brief curriculum vitae should be sent to Ron Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca by Sunday, March 19, 2023.
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