In “Dickens, Lawrence, and Readerly Entanglement” Brigid Chalk argues that Dickens and Lawrence underscore the forms of education and solace that lie dormant in novels, waiting for readers’ entanglement with them. For illustrations of this entangling, attaching phenomenon, Chalk draws on the novelists, on Marielle Macé’s work about reading and “being,” and on Rita Felski’s Hooked. Felski, against “the deference to detachment as the ... ideal...definitive...of late modernity,” redirects criticism to readers’ immersion in texts that offer “training in modes of paying attention” and the possibility of being “transformed for the better by an aesthetic encounter.” Accordingly, Chalk proposes, Dickens’s avatar David Copperfield “read[s] as if for life”; and Lawrence declares that “The novel can help us to live, as nothing else can.” Copperfield models reading and storytelling as necessary for self-fashioning and moral development. Lawrence’s essays and fiction express anti-social animus in favor of separating self from world, but they also contend that the novel creates new forms of attachment between persons and environment, opening possibilities of life that are not pre-determined or coerced. Probing the phenomenology of reading as attachment, Chalk maps transactions between readers and texts that extend outward and inward.
In “Remnants of Neglect in Our Mutual Friend” Tara Moore discusses her initial knowledge of attachment theory as she prepared to adopt a daughter. Fortunately, she explains, the philanthropist who managed her daughter’s group home in Beijing organized it along attachment theory lines. She points out that some characters with living biological parents in Our Mutual Friend did not enjoy the effects of such efforts. Dickens’ biological orphans—Johnny and Sloppy—demonstrate healthy states of attachment due to the care of unattached child-minder Mrs. Higden. In contrast, John Harmon and Jenny Wren, who were raised by at least one biological parent, experience difficulties attaching to their parents. Both characters grow to adulthood still bearing the effects of their childhood pain. John Harmon exhibits symptoms that suggest disassociation, a trait that child development specialist E. I. Carlson refers to unresolved attachment. Jenny’s behaviors could be described in terms of what clinicians P. Shaver and M. Mikulincer call “preoccupied with attachment” because she is “still angry with parents and can easily retrieve negative memories.” Enlisting these behavioral scientists to illuminate Dickens, Moore also draws on Kay Young’s reading of Bleak House (2012) in light of attachment theory, to demonstrate that the theory also newly illuminates Our Mutual Friend.
In “The Sorrows of the Lawrentian Persona and its Attachment to Dickens’s David,” Holly Laird, taking up Felski’s consideration of fiction’s “hooking” of readers, compares Lawrence’s persona in his 1908 poem "Dreams Old" with David Copperfield’s protagonist. Lawrence’s reading—of Lorna Doone and David Copperfield—prompts his poem. It begins, “I have opened the windows to warm my hands on the sill / . . . In a wistful dream of Lorna Doone.” It goes on to evoke “the old romance of [Dickens’] David and Dora.” The first hook for today’s reader lies in Lawrence’s “I”: separated from, yet still attached to, an imaginary past, while hinting at personal narrative. Copperfield begins with reservations about “I”: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” This initial hook asks whether “I” can become a reader’s hero. Generations of readers found an affirmative answer. In contrast, however, "Dreams Old" embeds the "I" in relationship, in “Dora and David,” but it then involves interrelatedness with separation. Involvement with separation became Lawrence’s lasting hook for readers. Copperfield too undergoes separations. Laird focuses on the “sorrows” of both Lawrence and David, in their separations from their “happy objects” (in Sara Ahmed’s terminology). Her argument builds on work by Raymond Williams, Michael Squires, Michael Hollington, and Ron Granofsky.
The three-presenter session facilitates audience response, which might include consideration of periodization's role in separating or attaching writers and their critics.