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Listening In: D. H. Lawrence and the Wireless
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 64, Number 2, Summer 2018
- pp. 264-285
- 10.1353/mfs.2018.0020
- Article
- Additional Information
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Abstract:
This essay argues that Lawrence's tropes of wireless connection reflect his pursuit of a politics of non-sovereignty in the second half of his career. Frequently overshadowed by violent claims to sovereignty or by the celebration of the immediacy of touch, wireless connections stand for a minor utopianism of affective receptivity. Countering the hegemony of broadcasting as well as the sovereign claims of his own supposed leader characters, Lawrence conceived of the novel as a wireless medium in its own right, attuned to affective energies that can enable an impersonal intimacy among dispersed individuals and their nonhuman environment.