This thesis is an examination of depression in D.H. Lawrences Last Poems in the light of Julia Kristevas theory of depressive discourse. Kristeva theorizes in Black Sun that depressed persons have difficulty communicating through ordinary symbolic means or language. In order to communicate, they must find new linguistic means to overcome sadness. Kristeva calls depressive discourse this attempt to overcome sadness through poetic language. Writing and art, and specifically poetry, can be depressive discourse, thereby allowing a certain level of recovery to occur. Once an individual can write about his or her sadness, the sufferer may experience a reprieve from depression, if only temporarily. D.H. Lawrences Last Poems, written in the last six months of his life and published posthumously, shows the crisis of depression in a dying man. The citation in the title is from Aldous Huxleys 1932 introduction to a volume of Lawrences letters, describing Lawrences change in mood in the last few months of his life (Huxley 30). Lawrences particular use of rhythm, tone and imagery can be identified as an attempt to overcome this crisis through writing. The poems exhibit specific formal features such as irregular metre, sonorous sound and hypnotically repeated words and phrases, as well as images of darkness, falling, dying, oblivion, and heaven and hell, that, coupled with the knowledge of his personal state, can be interpreted as features of depressive discourse. Using particular examples of depressive discourse within D.H. Lawrences Last Poems, this thesis will show that Lawrence was attempting to overcome his depression through poetry.

This thesis is an examination of depression in D.H. Lawrences Last Poems in the light of Julia Kristevas theory of depressive discourse. Kristeva theorizes in Black Sun that depressed persons have difficulty communicating through ordinary symbolic means or language. In order to communicate, they must find new linguistic means to overcome sadness. Kristeva calls depressive discourse this attempt to overcome sadness through poetic language. Writing and art, and specifically poetry, can be depressive discourse, thereby allowing a certain level of recovery to occur. Once an individual can write about his or her sadness, the sufferer may experience a reprieve from depression, if only temporarily. D.H. Lawrences Last Poems, written in the last six months of his life and published posthumously, shows the crisis of depression in a dying man. The citation in the title is from Aldous Huxleys 1932 introduction to a volume of Lawrences letters, describing Lawrences change in mood in the last few months of his life (Huxley 30). Lawrences particular use of rhythm, tone and imagery can be identified as an attempt to overcome this crisis through writing. The poems exhibit specific formal features such as irregular metre, sonorous sound and hypnotically repeated words and phrases, as well as images of darkness, falling, dying, oblivion, and heaven and hell, that, coupled with the knowledge of his personal state, can be interpreted as features of depressive discourse. Using particular examples of depressive discourse within D.H. Lawrences Last Poems, this thesis will show that Lawrence was attempting to overcome his depression through poetry.

In the history of intercultural relationships, no country has exercised so great an influence on the English geographical imagination as Russia. From its humble beginnings as the kingdom of Muscovy, to the sprawling expanse of the U.S.S.R., Winston Chruchill’s famous “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” both captivated and repulsed English audiences. Cartographically split between Europe and Asia, the ambiguous nature of Russian culture not only undermined absolute “Orientalist” binaries separating East from West, but also contributed, through the epoch-making fin de siècle influx of Slavic aesthetic forms, to the birth of English modernism. The idea of “Russianess,” for pre-war audiences, proved crucial to unsettling received notions of art, ideology, and identity. This destabilizing effect is especially evident in the work of Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. Despite having largely been dismissed as “reactionary” and “xenophobic” in their political stances, the complex and variegated way in which each author engages with Russia, as this study demonstrates, suggests an underlying ambivalence in their writing. Rather than reflecting a geographic reality, Slavic society, in their hands, appears as a collective fantasy, an external manifestation of their own internal doubts, anxieties, and pre-occupations concerning “Englishness,” which serves to elucidate the conflicted and uncertain politics of twentieth-century avant-garde art.

Quelles valeurs et fonctions à la fois sociales, éthiques et poétiques peuvent être attribuées à la création artistique ? Dans les romans étudiés – 'Rosshalde' et 'Le Dernier Eté de Klingsor' de H.Hesse, 'Jean-Christophe' de R. Rolland, L’'Arc-En-Ciel' et 'Femmes amoureuses' de D.H. Lawrence, la création apparaît comme le moyen privilégié de résister à la mécanisation de la société industrielle et au désenchantement moderne, bien plus, elle vise à repenser les fondements du monde occidental. Un rôle civilisateur et régénérateur est attribué à l’art. Cette idée conduit à aborder différentes conceptions du sujet et de l’identité de l’artiste : la création permettrait de concilier harmonieusement le singulier et l’universel, et l’artiste incarnerait volontiers une forme de philosophe, de héros, ou de prophète, ayant un rapport ambivalent à la communauté. De plus, ces romans empruntent des procédés d’écriture et de composition à la musique et à la peinture, tout en laissant également la part belle aux dialogues mettant en oeuvre des développements conceptuels. Le roman, en intégrant des raisonnements à la fiction, ne fixe pas d’interprétation. Il critique le dogmatisme et valorise une pensée dynamique et constamment liée à l’expérience. / Which values and functions, social, ethical as well as poetic, can be attached to artistic creation ? In the novels we studied - 'Rosshalde' and 'Klingsor’s Last Summer' by H.Hesse, 'Jean-Christophe' by R.Rolland, The 'Rainbow' and 'Women in Love' by D.H. Lawrence, creation seems to be the preferred means to resist the mechanization of the industrial society and to hold out against modern disillusionment, even more, it aims at rethinking the foundations of the western world. A civilizing and regenerating role is attributed to art. That leads us to approach different conceptions of the subject and of the identity of the artist : creation as a way to reconcile harmoniously the singular with the universal, and the artist as the reincarnation of a form of philosophy, of a hero, or of a prophet, having ambivalent relations with the community. Moreover, these novels adopt methods of writing and composition from music and painting, but they also give a lot of importance to dialogues making use of conceptual developments. By integrating reasoning to fiction, the novel does not fix the interpretation. It criticizes dogmatism and enhances dynamic thinking constantly linked to experience.

‘Der Magen ist die erste Lampe, auf die Öl gegossen werden muss. Sein Sehnen ist genau, sein Trieb so unvermeidlich, dass er nicht einmal lange verdrängt werden kann', schreibt Ernst Bloch, doch seine Aussage greift nicht nur aus psychoanalytischer Sicht zu kurz. Friedrich Nietzsche sieht in 'Essenordnungen' prinzipiell 'Offenbarungen über Kulturen', und natürlich hat Nahrung nicht nur einen körperlich-materiellen, sondern auch einen psychisch-soziokulturellen Aspekt. Nicht ohne Grund besitzen die 'sozialen oder erlernten Aspekte des Ernährungsverhaltens [...] eine größere Zähigkeit oder Konstanz als die biologisch-natürlichen'. Warum sich der Magen 'leichter als der Kopf an neue Speisen' gewöhnt und warum Ernährung keineswegs nur ein 'biochemisches Problem des Stoffwechsels' ist, sondern als ein 'soziales Totalphänomen' aufgefasst werden muss, verdeutlicht D.H. Lawrences Novelle The Virgin and the Gipsy u.a. anhand dessen, was man als ein ebenso elaboriertes wie ambivalentes kulturelles System der Küche bezeichnen kann.

Psychiater: 'Amerikas Jungen in der Krise', titelt Die Welt am 2. Juni 1998 und ruft unter Bezug auf den Psychiater William Pollock von der Harvard University 'eine nationale Krise des Knabenalters' aus. Nachdem '[j]ahrelang (...) in den USA die Förderung von Mädchen Priorität' hatte, offenbaren die Statistiken nun eine erschütternde Bilanz: 'Im Pubertätsalter begehen in den USA fünfmal so viele Jungen wie Mädchen Selbstmord. Jungen machen 90 Prozent der Disziplinarfälle aus und brechen viermal häufiger die Schule ab.' Während es unter männlichen Jugendlichen zu immer mehr Gewalttaten, wie beispielsweise der weltweit durch die Medien gegangenen Serie von Bluttaten an amerikanischen Schulen kommt, die 2002 in einem Film wie Bowling for Columbine sogar noch einen künstlerisch-kritischen Ausdruck findet, und sich Deutschland noch von den Schockwellen des Erfurter Massakers erholt, leiden nach einer in L'Actualité médicale publizierten kanadischen Studie im Kindes- und Jugendalter deutlich mehr Männer als Frauen an Beeinträchtigungen beziehungsweise Erkrankungen.

This thesis argues for a revised understanding of time in modernist literature. It challenges the longstanding critical tradition that has used the French philosopher Henri Bergson's distinction between clock-time and durée to explicate time in the modernist novel. To do so, it replaces Stephen Kern's influential understanding of modernity as characterized by the solidification of a homogenous clock-time, with Peter Osborne’s notion of modernity as structured by a competing range of temporalizations of history. The following chapters then read the fictional and historical writings of H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf alongside such a conception of modernity, and show that all these writers explored different versions of historical time. Wells explored geological time in The Time Machine (1895) and An Outline of History (1920), Lawrence adapted Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of eternal recurrence in Women in Love (1920), Movements in European History (1921) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and Woolf imagined an aeviternal historical continuity and a phenomenological historical time in Between the Acts (1941). By addressing historical time, this thesis enables a reassessment of the politics of modernist time. It challenges the view that the purported modernist exploration of a Bergsonian private time constitutes an asocial and ahistorical retreat from the political. Rather, by transferring Osborne's notion of a 'politics of time' to the literary sphere, this study argues that the competing configurations of politically-charged historical time in literary modernism, form the analogue of the competing versions of such a time within modernity, emblematized by the contrasting accounts of historical time of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin.

This essay explores how masculinity is portrayed in The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford) and Women in Love (D.H Lawrence), and how Victorian and Edwardian masculinity ideals impact the friendships between the characters John Dowell and Edward Ashburnham and Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich. The novels portray how hegemonic masculinity in Edwardian Britain changed from one type of masculinity, based on physical dominance, to include another, which drew on expert knowledge, capitalism and rationalism. In the texts, these masculinities are buttressed by the comparison to a male Other. In The Good Soldier, Edward Ashburnham stands for the ideals connected to dominance through his roles as landlord and soldier, and he is depicted as the “manlier” character in comparison to John Dowell. The same kind of coupling is found in Women in Love, where Gerald Crich represents both older ideals of dominance and newer ideals of expertise and rationality and Rupert Birkin is the relational opposite. Both Rupert Birkin and John Dowell are categorized as “not man” in the texts in order to emphasize that Edward Ashburnham and Gerald Crich are the “real” men. However, when the “manlier” characters have died both John Dowell and Rupert Birkin perpetuate masculine ideals, either by emulating hegemonic ideals or by redefining them. Furthermore, the Victorian and Edwardian conceptions of masculinity and male friendship inhibit the characters from forming emotionally close friendships. In both texts, emotional intimacy is portrayed as precarious and a more impersonal from of friendship that entails loyalty to a group or cause, camaraderie, is preferred.

This thesis investigates D.H. Lawrence’s idea of the “great background” in the context of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and how it reappears in a transformed way in Lawrence’s novels Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, and Women in Love. Through examining the perverse effects of modernism on these novels’ characters, this thesis argues that the “great background” is something that gradually moves inward––from the old, traditional “State” to an internal, inscrutable yet attainable reality.

This thesis proposes a new school of literary analysis: Kinky Criticism. This critical theory will examine the presence in literature of themes related to BDSM, an acronym referring to bondage/discipline, domination/submission, and sadism/masochism. My purpose in examining this power exchange and sadomasochism in literature is threefold. Firstly, I aim to reveal the presence of kinky themes in not only a range of literary works, but also leave the reader aware of kink present in everyday human interactions. Secondly, through this application to literature, Kinky Criticism sheds new light on the techniques of characterization and adds complexity to the dynamics between characters. Finally, Kinky Criticism provides a new perspective that leads to unexpected conclusions about hotly debated topics in literature, such as the infamous sodomites of Dante’s Inferno. Although a few scholars have commented on kinky themes, their analyses have not yet gained the coherence of a critical movement. This thesis aims to outline the tenets of Kinky Criticism and to establish not only its legitimacy as a critical lens, but also Kinky Criticism’s unique contributions to the interpretation of three major literary works: Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.