36th International D. H. Lawrence Conference: Home, Homes And Homeland

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.

Scientific Committee: Cornelius Crowley, Ginette Roy

Programme

Thursday 13 April

8.45 Registration and welcome

Morning sessions

Chair: Michael Bell
9.30-9-55 Laura Ryan, Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Galway, Ireland: “‘Would you have us live without houses […]?’: Lawrence and Homelessness”
9.55-10.20 Terry Gifford, Visiting Research Fellow, Bath Spa University, UK and Universidad de Alicante, Spain: “‘I have no home, that’s why I come’: Lawrence the Unaccommodated Poet”
Debate
 
Break

10.50-11.15 Marie-Géraldine Rademacher, visiting researcher at the University of Tokyo, Japan: “D. H. Lawrence, the Mining Community, and the Paternal Home”
11.15-11.40 Belaid Afettouche, Senior Lecturer, University of Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria: “The Home as Claustrophobic Space in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers”                                                 
Debate
 
Lunch at the university cafeteria (VIP room)

Afternoon sessions

Chair: Terry Gifford
2.00-2.25 Jane Costin, independent scholar, UK: “Lawrence and the ‘homeless soul’”
2.25-2.50 Fiona Fleming, Teaching Fellow, Université Paris Nanterre: “D. H. Lawrence and the late-Victorian conception of an English home”
Debate
 
Break
 
3.20-3.45 Marina Ragachewskaya, Full Professor, Minsk State Linguistic University, Belarus: “The Chronotope of Home in The Rainbow: Place, Time and Identity”
3.45-4.10 Shirley Bricout, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3: “Home, Homes, Homeland in ‘Things,’ a short story by D. H. Lawrence”
4.10-4.35 Peter Balbert, Full Professor, Trinity University, USA: “Repetition, Repression, and the Return to the Homeland in D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Last Laugh’: Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ and the Aesthetics of Revenge”
Debate

Friday 14 April

Morning sessions

Chair: Susan Reid
9.30-9-55 Jeff Wallace, Professor Emeritus, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK: “Feeling at home: Lawrence and the Anthropocene”
9.55-10.20 Howard J. Booth, Senior Lecturer, University of Manchester, UK: “D. H. Lawrence and ‘transcendental homelessness’”
10.20-10.45 Michael Bell, Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick, UK: “Lawrence chez lui?”
Debate
 
Break
 
11.15-11.40 Lee Jenkins, Professor, University College Cork, Ireland: “Homes from Home”
11.40-12.05 Adam Parkes, Professor, University of Georgia, USA: “‘Noble Ruined Haciendas’: Nostalgia and Nausea in The Plumed Serpent”
Debate
 
Lunch at the university cafeteria (VIP room)

Afternoon sessions

Chair: Jeff Wallace
2.30-2.55 Ronald Granofsky, Professor Emeritus, McMaster University, Canada: “Home, Recognition and Selfhood in D. H. Lawrence”
2.55-3.20 Holly Laird, Professor, University of Tulsa, USA: “The Career of a Keyword”
Debate
 
Break
 
3.50-4.15 David Ellis, Professor Emeritus, University of Kent, UK: “D. H. Lawrence and nostalgia”
4.15-4.40 Keith Cushman, Professor Emeritus, University of Greensboro, USA: “‘The country of his past’: The Aesthete’s Return in ‘A Modern Lover’ and ‘The Shades of Spring’”
Debate
 
7.00 Conference dinner in a Paris restaurant

Saturday 15 April

Morning sessions

Chair: Howard Booth
9.30-9-55 Susan Reid, independent scholar, UK: “A woman’s place? Lawrence writing women and women writing Lawrence”
9.55-10.20 Joanna Jones, Graduate Teaching Assistant, University of Manchester, UK: “The Queer Domestic Space of D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox”
Debate
 
Break
 
10.50-11.15 Isobel Dixon, poet and literary agent, UK: “Home-breaking and Homelessness: the force of flux in D. H. Lawrence’s life and work”
11.15-11.40 Tamar Osidze, independent scholar, Georgia: “The Problem of Homelessness in ‘Things’, ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’ and ‘England, My England’”
11.40-12.05 Stefania Michelucci, Full Professor, University of Genoa, Italy: “News from a City of the Dead: Joyce, Lawrence and the impracticability of home”
Debate
 
Buffet lunch

Afternoon sessions

Chair:
2.30-2.55 Jonathan Long, independent scholar, UK: “Nancy Pearn, D. H. Lawrence’s ‘queen of the magazines and newspapers’ in his home country”
2.55-3.20 Patrick Armstrong, Teaching Assistant, ENS Lyon, France: “D. H. Lawrence’s Archival Homes”
3.20-3.45 Gregory Walker, PhD candidate, Nottingham University, UK: “The Impact of Censorship on Lawrence’s Conception of ‘Home’”
Debate