Sookyoung Lee
March 11, 2014
MLA Doris Lessing Society CFP: Doris Lessing and Canada
Throughout Lessing’s prolific career, the central tenets of her questioning remain
doggedly consistent: individual conscience and its relationship to the collective; a rigorous
definition of commitment; the will to hope notwithstanding an utter bankruptcy of utopianism. I
propose to compare Lessing’s lecture series Prisons We Choose to Live Inside with her essay
“The Small Personal Voice” published nearly three decades earlier in the thick of Cold War
anxieties and Leftist political disillusionment. The responsibility of the writer outlined in the
earlier essay is, I argue, universalized in the later lectures as modes of detached self-reflection
required of all of us. I am interested in the way Lessing posits our relationship to the literary as
fundamental to the cultivation of objectivity required to learn from a legacy of violence, in the
way various articulations of “the writer” map onto definitions of the dissenting individual.
By translating the realist function of world-perception into a practical mechanism of
social change, Lessing effectively raises the stakes for everyone to rise to the task of the writer.
Put differently, revolutionary agency lies the capacity to be a writer – in so far as Lessing defines
the writer as an organism that has, in a brilliant turn of passive agency, “been evolved by society
as a means of examining itself.” It is not enough that I look, for we must look collectively; to be
more exact, for the latter phrase reeks of group-think Lessing ardently critiques in Prisons, we
must be a collection of each looking, each “using our freedoms” without being bound to it but
precisely putting pressure on paradigms like freedom. There’s more than Marxist didacticism at
work, namely the paradoxical sense that an imprisonment in language-recognition is necessary to
be free from the historical “prisons we choose to live inside.”
Bio:
I am a graduate student in the English Department at UC Berkeley with a B.A. in English and art
history from Swarthmore College. I advanced to candidacy in 2009, and I am currently writing
my dissertation, “Weak Modernism: Prewar Prosaics, Postwar Prolixity,” a formal genealogical
work that reorients modernism through the lens of critical realism in figures like D.H. Lawrence,
James Joyce and Doris Lessing. My research interests include British Modernism, aesthetic and
critical theory as emerged from Romanticism, narrative and novel theory. I work with Professors
Elizabeth Abel, Dan Blanton and Steve Goldsmith in the English Department and Tony Cascardi
in the Comparative Literature Department.