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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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.
 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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