Thesis--University of Leeds. / Bibliography: p. 302-306.

Chez D. H. Lawrence, le non-humain correspond à la fois à une forme de vitalité primordiale et aux créatures végétales et animales que cette vitalité anime bien davantage que les hommes, étouffés par une civilisation moderne qui les rend inertes. Le non-humain apparaît comme le dépositaire d‘une présence pure, existant avant ou hors de la culture. Lawrence est donc confronté à la difficulté de représenter cette présence pure par un moyen intrinsèquement « humain », le langage poétique. Il ne se pose alors pas simplement en anti-humaniste : son écriture poétique du non-humain procède d‘un conflit permanent entre la volonté de se libérer du carcan humain et la nécessité de demeurer dans la sphère humaine, voire de réinstaurer la limite entre humain et non-humain. Ce conflit s‘exprime déjà dans le non-humain comme simple matière vivante, sous la forme d‘une tension entre une conception de la matière comme pure présence extérieure à tout discours humain et une vision de la matière comme objet scientifique par excellence. Dans l‘évocation des créatures, le conflit incite Lawrence à réinventer spécifiquement pour elles des rapports au monde (émotions, perception, agentivité) qui leur permettent de préserver leur présence. Dans le rapport de Lawrence aux créatures non-humaines, le conflit demeure car Lawrence remet en question la limite qui le sépare du non-humain mais la réaffirme également. Enfin, la dialectique entre la volonté de saisir la présence du non-humain et la crainte de l‘abstraire complètement en l‘incluant dans le langage semble particulièrement présente dans ce que nous tentons de définir comme un langage poétique propre au non-humain, au-delà de sa simple utilisation chez Lawrence. / In D. H. Lawrence‘s poetry, the non-human is both a form of primordial vitality and the living world of non-human creatures. Non-human creatures are seen as more able to embody this vitality than modern men, stifled by their civilization. The non-human stands outside the sphere of culture, and its mode of existence is consequently an untouched, pure form of presence. Therefore, Lawrence faces the difficulty of representing this pure presence through an inherently ―human‖ means, poetic language. However, his stance is not entirely anti-humanist: his poetic writing of the non-human is founded on an unceasing conflict between the will to break free from the constraints of humanity and the necessity to remain within a human sphere, and even to reinstate the limit between human and non-human. In the representation of the non-human as mere living matter, this conflict is already manifest, taking the shape of a tension between matter as existing completely outside human discourse, and matter as a scientific object par excellence. When Lawrence evokes the creatures, this conflict brings about a reconfiguration of specific non-human modes of being in the world (emotions, perception, agency), which allow the creatures to interact with each other without diminishing or abstracting their presence. In the poet‘s own relationship with the non-human creatures, the conflict appears again as Lawrence questions the limit between human and non-human while reinstating it. At last, the dialectic between a will to capture non-human presence and the fear of abstracting it when including it within the sphere of language seems particularly present in what we have attempted to establish as a poetic language specific to the representation of the non-human, in Lawrence and other poets.

Texte remanié de : Thèse de doctorat : Littérature et civilisation anglaise : Montpellier 3 : 2006. / Bibliogr. p. 307-322. Index.

Using Gillian Beer's suggestion that literature and science 'share the moment's discourse' (Open Fields, 1996), this thesis explores the ideas associated with Albert Einstein's three revolutionary 1905 papers, examining the ways in which similar concepts appeared across disciplines during the early part of the twentieth century, and focusing in particular on their manifestation within the literary works of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. The study seeks to distinguish between instances of direct influence and a shared contemporary discourse, arguing that the analysis of both is essential to studies within the field of literature and science. Part I focuses on concepts of duality and complementarity, considering Max Planck's introduction of the quantum, Einstein's development of light quanta, Louis de Broglie's wave-particle duality and Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. It analyses other contemporary discussions of duality and complementarity, and explores Virginia Woolf's attempts to simultaneously express both sides of dualistic models, suggesting that Woolf is a complementary writer. Part II focuses on Einstein's theories of relativity, exploring D. H. Lawrence's adoption thereof in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), in particular his claim that 'we are in sad need of a theory of human relativity'. It argues that this proposed theory is directly relevant to Lawrence's fictional works, both those that precede Fantasia and those that follow it. It also analyses the impact on Lawrence of contemporary ideas of relativism, especially those of William James as expressed in Pragmatism (1907). Part III explores the ways in which both Woolf and Lawrence write about individuals within crowds. It considers the possible links between such scenes and Einstein's paper on Brownian motion as well as contemporary studies of crowd psychology. It suggests that individual characters within modernist works can be considered as similar to the individual particles suspended in a mass which exhibit Brownian motion.

In The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence departs from traditional literary techniques, going below the level of ego consciousness within his characters to focus on the elemental dynamic forces of their unconscious minds. Using three generations of the Brangwen family, Lawrence traces the rise of consciousness from the primal unity of the uroboros through the matriarchal epoch and finally to full consciousness, the realization of the self, in Ursula Brangwen. By correlating the archetypal symbols characteristic of three stages of consciousness outlined in Erich Neumann's Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother with the three sections of the novel, it is possible to show that Lawrence utilizes the symbols most appropriate to each stage.

D. H. Lawrence believed the individual psyche to consist of two parts: the active unconsciousness and the mental consciousness. The active unconsciousness is a sort of life force within the individual, and one that allows the individual a true connection to the world. It is also closely related to the body, and sometimes called “blood-being” or “blood-consciousness.” The mental consciousness could be said to be the “intellect” in the individual psyche, dealing with abstractions and ideas. Lawrence insists that contemporary society’s prioritizing of the functions of the mental consciousness leads individuals to allow it too much influence over their life. This ultimately leads them to become dominating, willful and deadly. Lawrence’s 1920 novel Women in Love is an allegory of what Lawrence saw as the detrimental effect on individuals by the over-emphasis on rationality in contemporary society, and also of the struggle to find a way back to a more natural way of existing in the world. This essay argues that the processes of, and struggle between, the mental consciousness and active unconsciousness, are illustrated in images of water. Surface and merging imagery connotes denial of or loss of contact with the active unconsciousness, eventually leading the individual to seek death. Flood and submersion imagery connotes a possibility to find a way back to a life lived in and through the active unconsciousness. Fountain imagery and images of water connoting growth and openness connote the strong, creative life force inherent in the active unconsciousness. However, some water imagery in the novel also contradicts any notion of a stable balance—Lawrence universe is one where death and destruction is a necessary component of life and creativity.

My dissertation argues that the writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence are animated by a shared belief that the way human beings experience and understand their worlds needs to be radically transformed. Their works expose how human experience is canalized by habits reinforced through education and custom, and they explore the ways people might overcome these limitations to expand the receptive possibilities of their experience, illustrating more fruitful ways their readers might engage their worlds. Their novels offer a radical recasting of the human subject and its situation in the environment, one that valorizes a turn away from the fixity of conceptual certainty and an embrace of experiences that trouble clean distinctions between the human being and its world. Reading through the lens of radical empiricism, this project makes the case that Woolf and Lawrence are together engaging in a similar project: they are working from a shared interest in intensive explorations of the seemingly ineffable qualities in concrete human experience and in bringing those accounts into language to suggest the relational constitution of the human being with other people and the environment. They are working experimentally to discern the extent to which the human being can know first-hand its place in the extensive world. In doing so, the authors come to understand such a human being differently, as simultaneously discrete and non-discrete. By examining the methodological and philosophical intersections of these two authors, this project serves as a first step in suggesting a radical empirical British modernism. Woolf’s and Lawrence’s approaches to experience have philosophical implications that become more apparent when read in conjunction with William James’s philosophy of radical empiricism and the related philosophies of Henri Bergson and A. N. Whitehead. While “radical empiricist” is not a common moniker for these philosophers, my project makes the case for the consideration of several of their works as reflective of a line of confluent thought that illuminates the concerns of some modernist literature with developing a new understanding of the human situation through an inclusive attention to lived experience. The project is organized into four chapters. In the first chapter, I establish the radical empirical philosophical situation of Woolf’s and Lawrence’s writing, revealing in their novels how the dispositions of the characters facilitate different worlds, and elaborating the attentive approaches that they valorize through their novels. In the second chapter, I explore their critiques of abstraction, elaborating their concern with fixed abstract forms while countering readings of their work as anti-intellectual or apophatically mystical. In the third chapter, I examine how in and through their novels they engage the difficulty of articulating preconceptual experience, and I explore how they productively use ambiguity towards this end. In the fourth and final chapter, I examine the relational situation of the human individual that their novels disclose and the sort of self-understanding that they champion through their work.