40th INTERNATIONAL D. H. LAWRENCE CONFERENCE

March 18-19, 2027

L'Université Paris Nanterre

D. H. Lawrence and French literature, philosophy and theory

The ambition of this conference is to explore various kinds of connections between D. H. Lawrence’s oeuvre and French theory, philosophy and literature.

Lawrence’s correspondence and essays, as well as Jessie Chamber’s memoirs, reveal the substantial list of (past and contemporary) French texts he was acquainted with. Ginette Roy’s article “Lawrence and ‘that beastly France’”[1] provides substantial material for grasping the range of Lawrence’s knowledge of French authors as well as its heterogeneity and Lawrence’s typical mixed feelings regarding them all. Our purpose then will be to dig into Lawrence’s texts and spot obvious or discreet traces of a French literary presence. What impact did Zola’s Naturalist preoccupation[2], Balzac’s realism, or texts by Maupassant, Flaubert and Stendhal, as well as more remote or more contemporary figures, have on Lawrence? Lawrence frequently has his fictional characters comment on French literature, such as when Clifford and Connie disagree about whether Marcel Proust’s oeuvre is “extraordinary” or “boring”; or when Miriam, in Sons and Lovers, declares that she “did not like Baudelaire on the whole – nor Verlaine”; or when we read of Helena in The Trespasser that, “with French verse she had no sympathy”, – unlike the young Lawrence himself. Likewise, in the play, A Collier’s Friday Night, Ernest introduces Maggie to Baudelaire’s verse and says “That’s what they can do in France. It's so heavy and full and voluptuous”.

We would like not only to analyse the aesthetic and intellectual effects of these intertexts and references, but also to address the question of their power of liberation (if any) on Lawrence’s writing, especially around the issues of sexuality (and its representation) or of social organisation (his essay “Education of the People”, among others, may be read as a prolongation and transformation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social and L’Emile). The early decades of the 20th century boiled over with intellectual debates in the Western world: debates in which Lawrence took part, either directly or (and this is what will be of interest for our conference) through his fiction and poems. In particular, the philosophy of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, so central to the zeitgeist, must necessarily have influenced Lawrence’s thoughts and, Bergson’s élan vital may well be read as a Lawrentian version of the spontaneous life impulse.

We will also try to shed light on the way in which Lawrencian scholars have used French philosophy: feminist texts by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray; psychoanalytic perspectives employing texts by Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva; structuralist perspectives of Roland Barthes. How have French philosophers and philosophy been used by scholars to grasp Lawrence’s oeuvre and to constantly renew our understanding? Some philosophers of the “French theory” have explicitly dealt with Lawrence’s work, most famously Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who consistently made references to it. As Anneleen Masschelein points out: “the
curious way Deleuze and Guattari paraphrase Lawrence’s minor texts, especially the essays, betrays a great familiarity”[3], while Jacques Derrida for his part proposes an analysis of Lawrence’s poem “Snake” in his seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (Volume I), about the “head” and “face” of the animal. A French reading of Lawrence will also draw our attention to, for instance, Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe who famously dedicated a whole section to “D.H. Lawrence ou l’orgueil phallique”.

Finally, we may also ask ourselves how Lawrence’s oeuvre has influenced (and still does) French literature and writing, such as (one may speculate) Georges Bataille, Catherine Millet in her Aimer Lawrence (2017), or even more recently Claire Fourier with Le Jardin Voluptueux (2022).

Among the possible topics of enquiry, we may suggest:
- Influence of French literature on Lawrence
- Influence of Lawrence’s texts on French authors and thinkers
- Intertextuality (deliberate or not)
- Comparative reading (Lawrence and French authors of any period)
- Reading Lawrence with French philosophy
- Translation: from the first translations into French, to the most recent ones

The deadline for proposals is 6 November 2026. Priority will be given to proposals received before the deadline, but we will continue to accept proposals until 27 November 2026.

Please send a 300-word abstract and a biographical note to
braultel@wanadoo.fr
patrick.armstrong@polytechnique.edu
timgupwell@hotmail.com
f.fleming@parisnanterre.fr

Organizing Committee: Patrick Armstrong, Elise Brault-Dreux, Fiona Fleming, and Tim Gupwell

Conference Fee: 80 euros

Link to our journal Etudes Lawrenciennes http://lawrence.revues.org/ 

[1] Ginette Roy, “Lawrence and ‘that beastly France’”, D.H. Lawrence Review, N°23, 1991.
[2] Andrew Harrison, “D.H. Lawrence, Emile Zola and the body unconscious”, The Bloomsbury Handbook to D.H Lawrence, 2024.
[3] Anneleen Masschelein, “Rip the Veil of the Old Vision Across, and Walk through the Rent: Thinking through Affect in D.H. Lawrence and Deleuze and Guattari,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate. Ed. Stephen Ross (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 23-39 (p. 23).