Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Alex Beeston
Guest: Professor Sarah Dowling, University of Toronto
Episode: Sarah Dowling, "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
Date: January 13, 2026

This episode features a rich and thoughtful conversation between host Alex Beeston and literary critic/poet Sarah Dowling about Dowling’s new book, Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form. The discussion explores the proliferation of prone, supine, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature and art, analyzing their significance for literary form, feminist and disability theory, political agency, and the interdisciplinary study of text and image. Dowling discusses the intersections of her previous and current research, her approaches to horizontal and community-rooted scholarship, and the stakes of critical and creative work in the current moment.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Relationship to Dowling’s Previous Work (03:16–11:56)

• Translingual Writing, Personhood Under Settler Colonialism (2018) overlaps with Here Is a Figure both chronologically and thematically.
• Both books engage experimental writing, focusing on aspects of literary form not typically foregrounded (“I approach the translingualism of those poems as a kind of formal feature. And I think about these recumbent figures… as a repeating thing that happens across many texts that does a certain kind of formal work.” – Dowling, 07:14)
• Here Is a Figure foregrounds feminist analysis more explicitly; continues engagement in the critique of settler colonialism and the political work of form.

Notable Quote

“As a white person born and raised on the Canadian prairies, I cannot doubt the value or the significance of this approach [settler colonial studies]. And I think it animates a lot of very important writing and art that's being produced today.”
— Sarah Dowling (10:22)

2. Tracking the Pattern of Lying Down Figures (13:05–17:25)

• Dowling describes the genesis of the book idea while teaching in a creative writing program and encountering many contemporary works with recumbent characters.
• Noticed “a strange commonality across people who are doing very different types of things,” prompting deeper inquiry.
• The figure of recumbency serves multiple, sometimes contradictory functions: abjection, rest, the remaking of historical image-making, and the dialectics of agency.

Notable Quote

“All of you have these lying down characters or speakers in these texts that you're sharing…this could be worth investigating. There could really be something here.”
— Sarah Dowling (14:09)

3. Laid Low vs. Upright: Philosophical and Political Stakes (17:31–25:39)

• Examination of the Western tradition elevating uprightness/bipedalism as an ideal of human subjectivity and (white, male) normativity.
• Drawing on philosophers like Adriana Cavarero and work on posture/uprightness (Beth Linker, Sandra Gilman), Dowling explores the moral, medical, and social associations entrenched in these figures.
• The recumbent figure recodes high art traditions (odalisque, convalescence) but also aligns with protest forms (e.g., ACT UP die-ins).

Notable Quote

“Unlike that morally and posturally upright figure, this is a figure that the modernist scholar Louise Hornby describes as down wrong. So it's very strongly associated with femininity, disability, passivity, but also with political defiance, refusal…”
— Sarah Dowling (24:25)

4. Interdisciplinary and Multimedia Approach; Analyzing the Book Cover (25:39–35:58)

• Dowling’s archive is deliberately multimedia: moving among poetry, novels, plays, performance, and visual arts.
• Example: The cover of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming features Rebecca Belmore’s artwork “Fringe,” which directly speaks to the themes of recumbency, Indigenous struggles, and care.
• The cover image becomes an interpretive resource, linking literary and visual cultures, and exemplifies horizontal influence among Indigenous women artists.

Notable Quote

“Anyone in Canada…would recognize this artwork very quickly…it's very well known, and part of the reason that it's so famous is because it was created in response to the arrest of Robert Pickton…”
— Sarah Dowling (29:10)

5. Feminist Stakes: Agency, Voice, and the Minor Action (35:58–45:30)

• The book analyzes how recumbent figures prompt an expanded sense of political agency, often encompassing “minor” or non-actions.
• Draws on feminist and disability theorists (e.g., Susan Wendell, Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory,” Elsa Dorlin).
• The gesture of lying down is not inherently political or apolitical; its meaning shifts depending on context. These figures foreground limitations on and forms of agency.

Notable Quote

“What these figures tend to highlight is the ways that our bodies are traversed by violence and how that both requires us to act…but also it is something that restricts our capacity for action at the same time.”
— Sarah Dowling (43:37)

6. Voice and the Second Person (45:30–53:01)

• Many texts discussed are written in the second person, creating a collective or invitational mode rooted in the plural “you.”
• Dowling structures her own book to echo these imperatives—enjambments and instructions bridge sections, inviting active reader participation and downward, horizontal relationality.
• Rejects the “upright I” in favor of collective, outward-turning address.

Notable Quote

“The kind of shifting of focus from the I to something that has a more outward direction and has a more kind of horizontal and sort of collective or possibly collectivizing capacity was something very important to me…”
— Sarah Dowling (52:39)

7. Practicing Horizontal Scholarship (53:01–61:59)

• Dowling aimed to write “from a community or peer group,” seeking lateral, not hierarchical, relations with her authors and co-readers.
• Describes seeking input from poets she discusses, foregrounding works from within her community, and intentionally erring towards collaborative knowledge production.
• Emphasizes the value of provisionality, openness, and engagement with emergent rather than canonized work.

Notable Quote

“There are interesting things going on around me that are relevant and worth thinking about. So thinking of it as a kind of on the ground or grounded idea in that sense…”
— Sarah Dowling (57:04)

8. The Value of Literature, Art, and Criticism (62:58–70:24)

• Discussion of art’s capacity to draw attention to material and historical grounds, linking text and world.
• Dowling frames her book as “a work of passionate advocacy and even excitement for literature and for literary criticism,” particularly for countercultural writing.
• Emphasizes the importance of thinking about “for whom are we doing what we do when we do literary criticism?” (Barbara Christian).
• Expresses concern for the future of scholarship and art under present funding and institutional pressures, while affirming the importance of public engagement and community through artistic events.

Notable Quote

“If anything, the process of bringing the book into existence has made me feel even more acutely how precious these practices of art-making and writing and publishing and criticism really are…”
— Sarah Dowling (64:54)

Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On methodology: “I was not disconnected and somehow kind of surveying a field, but instead doing something that kind of came out of my participation in a community of writers…” (56:12)
• On action and writing: “It's a figure that really attunes us to the limits on our action, sometimes because it's a figure for kind of not wanting to act, sometimes it's a figure for not being able to act…” (42:24)
• On the role of art: “...these are really important sites of kind of intellectual exchange, public participation, not just artistic creation. And I really see my work ... as contributing to the flourishing of that.” (69:23)

Timeline of Notable Segments

| Timestamp | Topic / Quote Highlights | |------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:16–11:56| Relationship of current and previous books, shared themes, shifts in feminist engagement| | 13:05–17:25| Origins of “the lying down figure” focus; first noticed patterns, process of noticing | | 17:31–25:39| Uprightness vs. recumbency; philosophical, ethical, and political discussion | | 27:02–35:58| Interdisciplinary readings, book covers as interpretive tools, links to visual art | | 35:58–45:30| Feminist politics, agency, and (dis)ability theory; rethinking what counts as action | | 45:30–53:01| The collective “you” in writing, formal decisions in structuring the book | | 53:01–61:59| Horizontal/situated scholarship, community-based interpretation, provisionality | | 62:58–70:24| Literature’s real-world stakes, advocacy, questions of audience and mission |

Conclusion & Takeaways

Dowling’s Here Is a Figure is an ambitious inquiry into the meanings and politics of recumbency in contemporary literature, exploring how these lying down figures challenge inherited ideas of action, subjectivity, and art. The episode is rich with references, theoretical interventions, and concrete reading strategies for listeners interested in feminist and disability studies, form, and interdisciplinarity. Dowling advocates for grounded, community-engaged scholarship and calls for renewed passion and responsibility in the practices of criticism and art.

Recommended for:

• Scholars and students of literary studies, feminist theory, and disability studies
• Readers interested in form and interdisciplinarity
• Anyone curious about the politics of bodies in literature and art

Selected Closing Quote:

“That's my aim for it, that it should stimulate and further these conversations that are already happening. That it should draw people toward those. That it should make it possible for people to find points of connection, to participate and engage.”
— Sarah Dowling (69:54)