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D.H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of the Ecocritical Turn (33rd Annual D.H. Lawrence Conference) (Paris)

D.H. Lawrence and the Anticipation of the Ecocritical Turn (33rd Annual D.H. Lawrence Conference) (Paris)

Publié le par Romain Bionda (Source : Cornelius Crowley)

D.H.LAWRENCE AND THE ANTICIPATION OF THE ECOCRITICAL TURN
3-6 avril 2019, Université Paris Nanterre

 

Deadline for the submission of a proposal: November 5 2018

 

[…] “the human soul is fated to wide-eyed responsibility in life”
D.H.Lawrence, “Man and Bat”

 

 

D.H. Lawrence has often been viewed as a post-romantic nature writer. Instead of looking back towards the 19th century writers who influenced him, we propose in the 2019 Conference in Nanterre to consider how his literary practice and the philosophy that underlies it herald the ecocritical turn of the late 20th century.

Broadly speaking, ecocriticism focuses on the study of the relationship between man and the natural environment, doing so from an interdisciplinary point view. Ecocriticism is concerned both with the protection of the environment and with the destiny of man in the geological era called the Anthropocene. Ecocriticism is a broad term, pointing to innumerable trends: ecopoetry, ecophilosophy (see Guattari’s ecosophy), ecoethics, ecoethology, ecopolitics, ecofeminism etc. We know that Lawrence, very early in his life, became aware of the damage caused to the world we live in by the activities of  man, through the imprint of  human enterprises.

We would like therefore to analyse in the 2019 Conference  what the concept of nature means for Lawrence,  how the attention he pays to the non-human and to the material world affects his art and connects both with his personal ethics and his form of spirituality. We will study both the extent and the limits of Lawrence’s “green thinking”,  in all areas, including his reflection on the man/animal dialectics, on what it means to be a man or to be human, his vision of the relations between women and men in the social order, his criticism of waste and of our materialist society, his meditation on “the silent great cosmos” , and also his particiular conception of  ecosexuality.

Bruno Latour, in a short book entitled Où atterrir? Where can we Land ? (La Découverte, 2017), writes: “No corporation would have spent a dollar in order to fabricate ignorance relative to the Higgs boson. Denial of climate change is however an entirely different matter and the funds flow in…. In other words, the sciences of nature-as-process cannot adopt the same, somewhat haughty and disinterested, epistemology as the sciences of nature-as-universe…”.

Lawrence invites a mode of critical engagement that in no sense subscribes to the “haughty and disinterested procedures” which, for (too?) long, defined the reading of modernist texts. Lawrence can therefore be read in relation to the preoccupations of “our times”. Just as he was prophetic in his anticipation of troubles ahead, our current situation enables us to read backwards,  in order to arrive now at a fuller appraisal of some of the underlying truths of his writing. That Lawrence as a miner’s son, born into the English midlands coalfields, should have grasped the subterranean conditionality of the surface order of wealth and power, industry and empire, is now something that appears both logical and visionary. He simply knew how to tune his comprehension to the pulse of “nature-as-process”, how to read the signs, whether on the ground or in the air. The ecocritical turn in our reading of Lawrence can be a turn towards an apocalypse beyond the biblical or Pauline tones in evidence in The Rainbow, a novel now closer to us, insofar as it was already, in its publication,  a world away from any Ibsenite space of domestic alienation or fulfillment. And the novel is perhaps also a radical  turn away from the provincialities of the bourgeois novel of relations between the sexes.

The call for papers is an invitation both to read our present moment and to read Lawrence, in a way that is attentive to the fate of the “universe-as-process”, able therefore to adopt, in relation to the Lawrentian opus, a critical approach neither “disinterested” nor “haughty”.

A (non-exhaustive) list of possible keywords:

Post-humanism, post-colonialism, anthropocentrism, ethnicity, regionalism, pastoral, science, evolution, energy, electricity, electron, work, money, domination, consumption, food, the non-human, objects, clothing and nudity, waste, ethical responsibility (see notably Derrida’s reading of “Snake”), climate, social changes, political vision.

 

Organizers :

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  •           Cornelius Crowley: cornelius.crowley@parisnanterre.fr
  •  Ginette Roy: ginette.katz.roy@gmail.com