In this essay, the author attempts to demonstrate the efficacy and exigency of adopting a cultural studies methodology in the university literature classroom. Following the advice of E. M. Forster's Margaret Schlegel, he has put his trust in a pedagogical philosophy, and praxis, that on a number of levels attempts to "only connect." The primary connection that allows him to be successful in the classroom is the one he forges between the texts that they study and the real lives of students who read them, a connection to which he gestures in his titular allusion to D. H. Lawrence's famous essay about the crucial life-lessons available to readers of fiction. In the literature classroom, this approach involves continually asking questions that explore what they can learn about their own contemporary lives, subjectivities, and social constructs from the literature they analyze, rather than approaching the literary text as a sacred, self-contained receptacle of transcendent wisdom. This practice, as he demonstrates in this essay, has long been a salient focal point of cultural studies. When students are able to see the relevance of literature in their most central daily concerns, they begin to value the vitality of the texts that they once may have considered at best merely academic, and at worst elitist and marginalizing. (Contains 47 notes.)