D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity by Indrek Männiste

Abstract

MLR, .,   ‘capacities of art’ (p. ). Simultaneously, Plotz is sensitive to the lasting impact of aesthetic strategies developed between  and , whose ‘operations activate modern imaginations’ (p. ) and serve as ‘historical antecedents for the current upheaval in thinking about states of partial absorption’ (p. ). Semi-Detached is a challenging and highly rewarding account, which illuminates a central but—until now—underexplored aspect of aesthetic experience. B U K K D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity. Ed. by I M. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. . xxii+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. D. H. Lawrence’s relationship with technology has never been unproblematic. He has been notorious for his vehement rejection of technological inventions, from the telephone to Clifford Chatterley’s electric wheelchair. Early Lawrence critics—the most familiar being F. R. Leavis—have written extensively on Lawrence’s hatred of the industrialized and mechanized world, set against the pastoral landscape, the only medium in which meaningful human relationships could unfold. Recent scholarship has started to complicate such dichotomous views by analysing Lawrence’s complex relationship with science and mechanization, including Fiona Becket’s D. H. Lawrence: e inker as Poet (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ) and Jeff Wallace’s D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ). D. H. Lawrence, Technology, and Modernity seeks to expand on existing criticism on Lawrence and technology, showing how, as Michael Bell puts it in the Foreword, ‘while driven by powerful conviction, [Lawrence’s] creative insight is subtly flexible and relative’ (p. xiii). e collection assembles chapters written by leading and emerging Lawrence scholars from across the globe. e essays cover a wide range of topics, including robots, the First World War, mining, cinema, and ecology. Partly because of the diversity of themes, the volume is not organized in different subsections, which creates a slight sense of incoherence. As the editor claims in the Introduction, the first chapters offer some general biographical and historical information on Lawrence, while later chapters provide more nuanced close readings of Lawrence’s fiction and essays. e most successful essays analyse Lawrence’s works from a historical perspective , examining the cultural context of the period while offering thoughtful and innovative close readings. Andrew Harrison’s essay provides a new reading of Lawrence’s short stories ‘England, My England’ and ‘Tickets Please’, texts that demonstrate the difficulty of drawing a clear line of demarcation between human and machine, the machine being oen described as an inherent part of the human. Jeff Wallace analyses two less familiar short stories, ‘e Witch à la Mode’ and ‘Jimmy and the Desperate Woman’, to show how certain fictional motifs identified in Lawrence’s writing (acting in an inexplicable way, leaving without any reason)  Reviews can be read through the lens of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘technologies of the self’. Wallace argues that Lawrence’s fictional technologies of the self do not have a dehumanizing effect but rather reveal the therapeutic force at the heart of his fiction, which originates ‘from how little we are likely to know about how, and how much, we can materially affect each other’ (p. ). One of the best chapters in the volume is Fiona Becket’s essay on Lawrence’s poetry and ecocriticism. She argues that Lawrence’s idea of consciousness transcends human rationality and is rooted in a kind of ecological awareness, best described by terms such as ‘sap-consciousness’ and ‘dehiscence’, as used in Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Yet Becket warns against a merely pastoral reading of Lawrence’s nature poetry, noting how his poems oen present plants as bound up with mythological and technological connotations, thus destabilizing the boundaries between nature and culture. An evident weakness of the collection is the length of chapters; one wishes that the contributors had been given a greater word limit for their analyses and thus wider scope for historical research. ere are also a few editorial lapses: several lines or phrases from individual chapters are reprinted verbatim in the Introduction (see the first lines on page  and page ). Nevertheless, the collection offers a new perspective on Lawrence’s complex relationship with different forms of technology, and represents a...