"After us, not out of us": Wrestling with the Future in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love
TL;DR: The authors argue that women in love, despite its air of apocalyptic defeatism, offers D. H. Lawrence's most intense engagement with the problem of how to imagine the future, through the figure of the couple, and ultimately hinges upon an unresolved tension between heterosexual and same-sex coupling.
Abstract: I argue that Women in Love , despite its air of apocalyptic defeatism, offers D. H. Lawrence’s most intense engagement with the problem of how to imagine the future. Lawrence’s tenuous hope for a world that does not repeat the oppressive patterns of normativity is communicated, surprisingly, through the figure of the couple—often a site of stinging critique for Lawrence—and ultimately hinges upon an unresolved tension between heterosexual and same-sex coupling. Far from being extinguished in the novel’s pages, the project of creating a new future for the couple is passed along to the reader to pursue.
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07 Jun 2016
TL;DR: A close study of D.H. Lawrence's pre-war novels vis-a-vis the way they are different from his post-war fiction as discussed by the authors shows that Lawrence in these postwar novels was full of cynicism, pessimism and hatred for European and English people, society, culture and modes of life.
Abstract: This article is an effort to explore D. H. Lawrence’s pre-War novels vis-a-vis the way they are different from his post-war fiction. A close study of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and other post-war novels shows that Lawrence in these post-war novels was full of cynicism, pessimism and hatred for European and English people, society, culture and modes of life. These novels depict European people and society as showing a flux of corruption, decay and death. The novels are replete with imagery of death, decay, rottenness and impotency. Prewar novels, on the other hand, do not show such distrust of life. These novels exhibit his buoyant celebration of life being blissfully blind to harsh socio-cultural realities. They are full of the images of life, fertility, nature and regeneration. There may be various reasons for Lawrence’s changing vision and attitudes but war looks to be the main deciding factor which made such a striking contrast between Lawrence’s Pre-war and Post-war novels. This study has less focused Lawrence’s post-war novels; rather it is mainly concerned with his pre-war novels to show Lawrence’s early zest for life and blindness to harsh socio-cultural realities.
2 citations
TL;DR: Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence as mentioned in this paper is a collection of nine essays written between 1967 and 1990 by Mark Spilka, which directly confront newly controversial issues like Lawrence's anal obsessions, his struggles with tenderness, his hostility toward wilful women, his late reaction to his own impotence, his apparent grudge against the clitoris, and his dubious status as an abusive husband.
Abstract: Along with such critics as F.R. Leavis and Harry T. Moore, Mark Spilka helped establish the \"normative\" Lawrence of the 1950s, a prophetic artist who tests, explores and frequently affirms new life-possibilities for love, friendship, and marriage in his finest fiction. Since that time, Spilka has been defending the \"normative Lawrence\" from changing critical perspectives which have tended to deny or diminish that view of his importance. \"Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence\" consists of nine such reconsiderations, written between 1967 and 1990, which directly confront newly controversial issues like Lawrence's anal obsessions, his struggles with tenderness, his hostility toward wilful women, his late reaction to his own impotence, his apparent grudge against the clitoris, and his dubious status as an abusive husband - issues that reflect the mounting pressures of the last three decades against any kind of normative claims for Lawrence. These essays are designed, however, to keep those claims alive and well in changing times. In the process, moreover, they aim to help redefine Lawrence's contributions to counterculture movements of the 1960s and to the sexual, feminist and gay revolutions of recent decades. Spilka's attention to the conception, development, and critical importance of each of the book's nine essays, is intended to make \"Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence\" a useful addition to Lawrence studies.
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Book•
01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: The idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life as mentioned in this paper, and it has powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern lives involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations.
Abstract: Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world without publics. In the eight essays in this book, Michael Warner addresses the question: What is a public?According to Warner, the idea of a public is one of the central fictions of modern life. Publics have powerful implications for how our social world takes shape, and much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelations. The idea of a public contains ambiguities, even contradictions. As it is extended to new contexts, politics, and media, its meaning changes in ways that can be difficult to uncover.Combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extensive case studies, Warner shows how the idea of a public can reframe our understanding of contemporary literary works and politics and of our social world in general. In particular, he applies the idea of a public to the junction of two intellectual traditions: public-sphere theory and queer theory.
2,365 citations
TL;DR: In this article, publics and counter-publics are compared in the context of counterpublics and publics. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol 88, No. 4, pp. 410-412.
Abstract: (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Quarterly Journal of Speech: Vol. 88, No. 4, pp. 410-412.
1,122 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2005
TL;DR: In this article, Jameson's most substantial work since "Postmodernism", investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age.
Abstract: This is a brilliant study of utopia and science fiction, from Thomas More to Philip K. Dick, by the master literary critic. "Archaeologies of the Future", Jameson's most substantial work since "Postmodernism", investigates the development of the Utopian form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of Utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness...alien life and alien worlds...and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more.
795 citations
Book•
15 Dec 1997
TL;DR: Sedgwick as discussed by the authors discusses the importance of being bored in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Female World of Exorcism and Displacement in Henry James's Nineteenth-Century The Portrait of a Lady.
Abstract: Acknowledgments vii Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You / Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1 Part I. Digital Senses Prophylactics and Brains: Beloved in the Cybernetic Age of AIDS / Kathryn Bond Stockton 41 Strange Gourmet: Taste, Waste, Proust / Joseph Litvak 74 Outing Texture / Renu Bora 94 The "Sinister Fruitiness" of Machines: Neuromancer, Internet Sexuality, and the Turing Test / Tyler Curtain 128 Part II. The Affective Life of Capital The Importance of Being Bored: The Dividends of Ennui in The Picture of Dorian Gray / Jeff Nunokawa 151 Balzac's Queer Cousins and Their Friends / Michael Lucey 167 Part III. Teacher's Pet Defying "Development": Thomas Day's Queer Curriculum in Sandford and Merton / Anne Chandler 201 Wizards, Warriors, and the Beast Glatisant in Love / Barry Weller 227 Forged in Crisis: Queer Beginnings of Modern Masculinity in a Canonical French Novel / James Creech 249 Flogging is Fundamental: Applications of Birch in Swinburne's Lesbia Brandon / John Vincent 269 Part IV. Men and Nations Same-Sex Unions in Modern Europe: Daniel Deronda, Altneuland, and the Homoerotics of Jewish Nationalism / Jacob Press 299 To Die For / Cindy Patton 330 Tearing the Goat's Flesh: Crisis, Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity / Robert F. Reid-Pharr 353 Part V. Libidinal Intelligence: Shocks and Recognitions The Autochoreography of an Ex-Snow Queen: Dance, Desire, and the Black Masculine in Melvin Dixon's Vanishing Rooms / Maurice Wallace 379 Lip-Reading: Woolf's Secret Encounters / Stephen Barber 401 The Female World of Exorcism and Displacement (Or, Relations between Women in Henry James's Nineteenth-Century The Portrait of a Lady) / Melissa Solomon 444 Strange Brothers / Jonathan Goldberg 465 Bibliography 483 Index 501 Contributors 517
174 citations
Book•
21 Sep 1994
TL;DR: In this paper, the author investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities, including how the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy", and what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject.
Abstract: In a study that should be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, the author investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it? Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Stoker's Dracula, and Lawrence's Women In Love.
41 citations