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ELT 46 : 3 2003 a cluster of networks of interwoven personal relationships, networks often anchored by active, capable, creative women. E. P. WALKIEWICZ ------------------------ Oklahoma State University Considering the Decline of D. H. Lawrence Gary Adelman. Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. 181 pp. Cloth $34.50 IN Gary Adelman's short, problematic, and important book, ReclaimingD . H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out, he attempts an unusual response to the well-chronicled and unfortunate decline in Lawrence's reputation with an illuminating and unorthodox strategy. The volume integrates his own interpretative perspectives on Lawrence (as well as his often unsuccessful experience teaching his work) with the compelling responses of a large number of prominent contemporary poets and fiction writers to whom he wrote a lengthy letter soliciting their opinion of Lawrence's art as well as their related speculations on why this modernist, for the last twenty years, is decreasingly included on the syllabi of relevant university courses in the United States and United Kingdom. Unlike—according to Adelman—most students and many academics and professional critics, the great majority of writers who responded to his inquiries offer resonant and enthusiastic defenses of Lawrence's work and celebrate the enduring value of his art. They also provide a provocative range of opinion about the causes and contributing factors of his recently diminished stature in the academy. Among the fundamental reasons outlined for today's too trendy dismissal of Lawrence are the prevalence of gender politics, the tyranny of political correctness, the aversion to his alleged inclinations toward fascism , and the reaction against the pervasive tone of visionary conviction in his work. Adelman wisely elects to include lengthy excerpts from the remarkably candid letters he frequently receives from the writers he canvases; he pursues an organizational design that occasionally juxtaposes conflicting opinions to create a compelling texture of counterpoint as we read through the disparate opinions of contemporary writers more than seven decades after Lawrence's death. Adelman also intelligently contemplates the related paradox that the relative neglect of Lawrence in required course material conflicts with the abundant evidence that scholars still discuss his achievement in numerous articles, books and presentations. Indeed, Cambridge University Press also continues its elegant productions begun in the early 1980s of expensive and 328 BOOK REVIEWS definitive editions of Lawrence's multi-genre achievement in novels, short stories, poetry, drama, and nonfictional prose. Such disjunction in the reactions of students and professors about a major artist remains a striking peculiarity, as the faculty continues to research a writer whose work it scarcely engages in the classroom. To me the only answer suggested by this evidence—an answer never directly offered in Adelman's book—is the prevalence of a profound timidity in the professoriate about undertaking an energetic and informed defense in college courses of Lawrence's art, especially when such an advocacy flies in the face of the relatively unjudgmental, postmodernist pedagogy that stands as the abiding fashion for the last quarter century. In Sandra Gilbert's illuminating foreword to this study, she notes that at the core of the "striking ebb in Lawrence's standing on campus" are a "number of different and conflicting attitudes" toward the pervasive quality of his "earnestness," a quality that Gilbert properly defines as "passionate commitment and unwavering frankness." It is the same quality that the novelist Richard Powers accurately calls "the kiss of death in the 1990's academy," for as Powers further insists—"the novels that critics most trust are those that build into themselves their own deconstruction ." But the irony may be that for all his vaunted earnestness and often unambiguous visionary passion, Lawrence in his finest works can be fashionably deconstructed to reveal an intriguing level of selfcriticism encoded in the pontifications of his fictional heroes. Adelman uses the first chapter to "describe what Lawrence means to different readers, particularly students who only judge him on the basis of ideology and novelists who largely connect with him as an artist." The chapter also includes a lengthy discussion of Lawrence's "totalizing vision , his Weltanschauung" in order to demonstrate "the worst, the Lawrence that gives credence to his caricature in...

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