D.H. Lawrence and the Question of American Literature

March 11

Jonathan Ivry, associate professor and chair, Literature, Writing, and Film

What does it mean to read D.H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature today, a hundred years after its composition?  Does this book, hailed by several generations of literary critics as itself a classic study of American literature, still have relevance?  No dry, sober piece of literary criticism, Lawrence’s study is full of bold, even outrageous claims about the American experience and the writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who sought to capture that experience.  This presentation will revisit the life and career of D.H. Lawrence, his controversial legacy, and the question of what constitutes American literature today.