DHLSNA

Conference Announcements

Call for Chapters:  D. H. Lawrence and the Working-Class

I am looking for a chapter on D. H. Lawrence for my forthcoming collection, the Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature. The book is under contract and scheduled to appear in the second half of 2023. It is a large, wide-ranging volume, covering a range of periods and national traditions, and will feature the work of scholars from across the globe. The chapter can focus on any aspect of Lawrence’s work but should examine what it means to think of him as a working-class writer and his relation to working-class literature or culture. Contributors are encouraged but not required to explore broader questions about the definition and function of working-class literature as a critical category. The chapter should be no longer than 7500 words and is due by the end of February 2023. I would be happy to share a copy of the book proposal and the list of current contributors if this would be useful, or to discuss the project by email or on the phone. Please contact me at b_clarke@uncg.edu if you have any questions.  

Paris Nanterre University

     36^th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE

13-15 April 2023

HOME, HOMES AND HOMELAND

  CALL FOR PAPERS

"This is our own still valley / Our Eden, our home” 

                              Renascence

“And I’m a pale-face like a homeless dog

That has followed the sun from the dawn through the east”

The Red Wolf

As a writer who spent the last ten years of his life travelling around the world in search of the freedom and creativity he felt his homeland could not give him, the least that can be said about Lawrence’s relationship to his home is that it was complex and shifting.

Lawrence’s early stories, set in his native Midlands, offer a historical and sociological testimony of life in the colliers’ and farmers’ homes – complete with details of the rent, furniture and architecture of their houses – and invite us to think about the duality of the home as both one’s parents’ home and a place of one’s own. Thus, nostalgia for the childhood home as a place of “irresponsibility and security” (Rainbow 76) recalls past feelings of belonging and comfort: “the heart of me weeps to belong / To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside / And hymns in the cosy parlour” (Piano). The parental home provides protection against the hostility of the outside world, yet it may also be perceived by young men and women as a place of oppression to be escaped

We will therefore study how Lawrencian characters are induced to leave home and the shielding influence of mothers – a necessary step towards adulthood: “the long voyage in the quiet home was over; we had crossed the bright sea of our youth” (The White Peacock 237). Some relinquish the notion of a traditional physical home, finding a home instead in the body of the beloved, like the poet-narrator of Song of a Man Who is Loved: “Between her breasts is my home”; others still, are compelled to leave the homeland, as Lawrence himself did in 1919, after many conflicts with the Home Office, involving the prosecution and destruction of The Rainbow in 1915, or his disgust with England’s government policies during the war. His fiction, letters and poems of that period show him to be unequivocally at odds with the politics and public feeling of his home country, which he openly criticised in the likes of the poem Songs I learnt at School, justifying his flight abroad.

Thus “home” becomes a denomination for England or Europe in Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush and The Plumed Serpent, as Lawrence unearths traces of “home” in Australian cities, analyses how the “Old Country” is considered by the Australians, and ponders his own relationship to the now distant “home” country and the pull “homewards”. The Rananim project was of course one of the ideals Lawrence pursued around the world and in his writing, as his travelling protagonists seek to recreate a home for themselves abroad: Harriett Somers’s yearning for the safety and rootedness of a home manifests itself in contrast to Richard Somers’s rejection of homeliness, as Birkin did before him. Jack, in The Boy in the Bush, also asserts his homelessness, the word “home” having lost its meaning: “There are words like home, Wandoo, England, mother, father, sister, but they don’t carry very well” (230).

Feeling at home neither in one’s native country nor abroad, with no lasting home, one may become a “wandering Jew,” as Lawrence referred to himself in letters, subjected to bouts of homesickness, like Kate Leslie longing for spring or Christmas in Britain. Yet Lawrence invariably seems to imagine homecoming as an experience of estrangement and disappointment. Is there no permanent home then, for Lawrence and his characters, besides the eternal home behind the sun or in the moon, in The Plumed Serpent? But even that is the mystic home of the gods, to which Quetzalcoatl, Jesus and Mary retire. There remains the psychological home, feeling “at home in ourselves” (Woe), or the “home” of the Morning Star, in which men and women become their true selves.

Possible paths of reflection:

Home as a paradoxical space and polysemic concept

Home as a personal, physical or metaphysical space

Domesticity

Women’s and men’s roles at home 

Home as the mother-country

The metaphorical uses of the word home

From nostalgia to emancipation

Home and identity formation

Privacy and community

Homelessness and homecoming

The typology of dwellings (sociological implications, narrative function of these descriptions)

Comfort, furniture, decoration, possessions

The Lawrences’ homes in England and abroad

Foreigners who made England their home

Organisers: Elise Brault-Dreux, Fiona Fleming

Scientific Committee: Cornelius Crowley, Ginette Roy

The deadline for proposals is 7 November 2022.  Priority will be given to proposals received before the deadline, but we will continue to accept proposals until 14 November 2022.

Please send a 300-word abstract to

Fiona Fleming, fiona.fleming@parisnanterre.fr

Conference fee: 85 euros

Link to our journal Etudes Lawrenciennes: https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/

MLA 2023

San Francisco, CA (Jan. 5-8, 2023)

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers for a panel on “Lawrence, Work, and the Working Class” at the Modern Language Association conference in San Francisco, CA on 5-8 January 2023. Papers may treat any aspect of Lawrence’s life or work in relation to this theme. Please email an abstract of 250-300 words with a brief c.v. and A/V requirements to Ron Granofsky, McMaster University, at granofsk@mcmaster.ca by the 19^th of March, 2022.

MLA 2022
Washington, DC (Jan. 6-9, 2022)

     The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America invites papers for a panel on “Lawrence, Disease, and Recovery” at the Modern Language Association conference in Washington, DC on 6-9 January 2022.  Papers may treat any aspect of Lawrence’s life or work in relation to this theme.  Please email an abstract of 250-300 words with a brief c.v. and A/V requirements to Adam Parkes, University of Georgia, at aparkes@uga.edu by 20th March 2021.   

‘What a pity that distance remains distance, so absolutely’

*Calls for Short Papers by April 15, 2021
(Details in both Word or PDF)

In our time of pandemic that necessitates social distancing and raises concerns about our proximity to others, we propose a series of online roundtables and workshops of short papers to consider D. H. Lawrence on or from a distance and in or on proximity. From the horizon-gazing Brangwen women in The Rainbow to the reclusiveness of ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, distance is a recurring theme in Lawrence’s work as well as in his much-travelled life. Distance is also inherent in modernist notions of ‘impersonality’, relating to the Baudelairean flaneur and informing the original idea of ‘social distance’ coined by Georg Simmel (Soziologie, 1923). Theories of proximity abounded too, from a modernist focus on the everyday and concepts of the heimlich (Freud and Heidegger) to burgeoning nationalism and Lawrence’s own ideas about ‘blood consciousness’.

The symposium will be hosted on Zoom by the D. H. Lawrence Society of Great Britain with no fee for registration and everyone is invited to attend any or all of the events, regardless of whether you are scheduled to present. The symposium will be scheduled to accommodate international time zones as far as possible, usually between 1300‒2200 GMT.

Taos, NM, (NEW DATE: July 17-22, 2022)

Visit the conference website to learn all about the event and the registration fee