Module description
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was one of the most pioneering and controversial writers of the twentieth century. He is the author of a large body of complicated, brilliant, sometimes maddening novels, plays, poems and essays. He engaged passionately and idiosyncratically with the major literary and intellectual currents of his day and had complicated views on gender, sexuality, the body, the novel, psychoanalysis, primitivism, industrialisation, war, socialism, fascism which are both propounded in his essays and explored complicatedly in his fiction and plays. This course will allow students to look in depth at Lawrence’s work across these genres and to consider this work in the context of major political, literary and philosophical debates that link his times to ours. In particular, it will consider Lawrence’s work as reflecting, challenging and creating the modern self.
Lawrence feared and hated modernity and criticised its effects on the self, whether it was the psychoanalytic conception of the self or the effects of industrialisation on the individual psyche. However, in his work he was nonetheless instrumental in writing the modern self into being, both through his formal experiments with writing subjectivity and through his radical ideas about gender and sexuality. We will consider the modern self as a psychological, literary and sociological phenomenon alongside Lawrence’s work.
Over the past century since Lawrence began publishing, he has remained a controversial figure, twice banned during his lifetime and then used as a test case for a major trial investigating the possibilities of literary censorship in 1960. Acclaimed at that point as a pioneer of sexual and intellectual freedom, he was then castigated by Kate Millett in her 1969 study Sexual Politics. As a result, Lawrence gradually fell out of fashion and it is only in the past twenty years that there has been renewed enthusiasm for studying him in the university.
Looking back from Millett to earlier female readers, from Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf to Simone de Beauvoir, and forward to recent readers, including Doris Lessing, Angela Carter and Rachel Cusk, this course will ask why Lawrence has proved so problematic for women from his day to ours, and what this tells us about the sexual politics of literary criticism and the formation of a literary legacy more generally. We will also use the controversy surrounding Lawrence’s banned books to consider the ethics of censorship. Was the culture striking back against Lawrence, judging his conception of selfhood too modern for its own good? And were his female readers sharpening their own conceptions of selfhood at the same time as they divided between chastening and applauding him for his?
Assessment details
Presentation (15%), 3000 word essay (85%)
Educational aims & objectives
The module enables third year English literature students to focus in on one major writer at the same time as working across a range of genres and thinking conceptually about selfhood. Through introducing them to a range of novels, poems, essays and a play, it encourages them to think specifically about questions of voice and genre. By focusing on a writer who was controversial and involved in many of the major literary and political debates of his day, it enables them to gain a specific take on the philosophical and political ideas of the early twentieth century. By considering selfhood from a psychological, sociological, feminist and literary perspective it enables them to think across disciplines. By including women who have read Lawrence across the past century it offers a window onto the gender politics of literary criticism.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, the students will be able to demonstrate intellectual, transferable and practicable skills appropriate to a Level 6 module and in particular will be able to:
Demonstrate detailed knowledge of a range of D.H Lawrence’s writing, key elements of early twentieth-century culture and the relationship between these two. They will have demonstrated the ability to situate these texts in their cultural, historical and political contexts. They will have demonstrated an understanding of the issues at stake in censorship and the gender politics of literary criticism. They will have demonstrated an understanding of the formal differences between a range of genres and an understanding of the different disciplines that can be used to study selfhood.
Teaching pattern
2 hour seminar, weekly