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Sarah Dowling, "Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Alex Beeston and I'm a host on the Film and Literary Studies channels. Today I'm joined by Professor Sarah Dowling, a literary critic and poet based at the University of Toronto. Our topic today is Sarah's latest book, Here is a Grounding Literary form, published by Northwestern University Press in 2025. Here is a Figure is a fascinating and ambitious work of literary criticism with all the erudition and theoretical acuity that are the hallmarks of Sarah's work. In the book, she moves toward the ground of contemporary literature, art, and life, finding there an array of figures who lie down and who refuse or are unable to get back up again. Feminized figures of Recumbency and passivity are seemingly everywhere in both mainstream and experimental literary and artistic works from the late 20th century to the present. Murder victims, protesters, invalids, depressives, sex workers, and more. For Dowling, these figures do a surprising amount of work from their position on the floor, challenging our notions of human subjectivity and agency and at the same time turning our attention to the ground against which they stretch. So thank you so much for writing such a beautiful and provocative book, Sarah, and also for speaking with me today about it.
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C
Well, thank you so much for inviting me and for reading it and for the generous introduction. I'm really excited to have this conversation with you.
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A
Me too. Okay, so I wanted to start by asking you about the relationship between this book and your previous scholarly book, the 2018 study Translingual Writing, Personhood Under Settler Colonialism. What is the relationship between these two studies? What do they share as they kind of connect to your wider intellectual interests? And perhaps also what differentiates them? And I'm thinking about maybe some of the particular challenges or opportunities that arose when it came to writing about prone or supine figures.
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C
Yeah, thank you for asking about this. I think this is a really nice place to begin because actually there was quite a substantial period of overlap in the writing of these two books. Translingual Poetics began its life as my doctoral dissertation. So I did first start writing it kind of in the mid 2000s or so. And then by about 2013, when I had finished my PhD and was starting in my first job and really writing the book version, that was kind of the time when I got the idea that I would write this lying down book as I was then thinking of and calling here is a figure. So really there was a period of about five years where, at least to some degree, at least a little bit, I was working on both of them. So for anyone who hasn't come across Translingual Poetics, it's a study of contemporary poetry from North America that uses more than one language. And the argument is more or less that when this poetry is considered, which, you know, let's be honest, most of the time it's not considered at all, but when it is, it's often done in a way that kind of aligns it with a sort of liberal multiculturalist politics. So it will tend to be invoked as a kind of exemplar of diversity, the poetry that diverse people write that has the diverse words from their diverse communities. But to me, that's not a very attentive way to read the poems themselves. And in my readings of them, I really approach them as critical analyses of the ways that multiculturalism is mobilized, and particularly of the ways that multiculturalism is mobilized in furtherance of settler colonialism. So in that book I look at poems by people like Layli Long Soldier or Narbese Philip that really contest the ways that multiculturalism can be used to construct a narrative of goodness for a particular state like Canada or the U.S. so when these poets and others turn away from English and toward other languages, they're often doing so in a way that really shows what those narratives of goodness conceal. So in the cases of those poets, that would be ongoing indigenous genocide or the African slave trade and its legacy of anti black violence. So this would be one place where I could start to point out some of the areas of shared inquiry between Translingual Poetics. And here's a figure, I think in the most kind of overt sense, both of them are focused on experimental writing and the kind of political work of literary form, and both of them kind of draw out things that aren't, that don't typically fall under the umbrella of form. So I approach the translingualism of those poems as a kind of formal feature. And I think about these recumbent figures as it's not a form exactly, but it's a repeating thing that happens across many texts that does a certain kind of formal work. And both books are also very engaged in the critique of settler colonialism. And maybe just as a sort of aside, I can say that in the time since I wrote Translingual Poetics, there have been increasing attempts to delegitimize settler colonial studies or the concept of settler colonialism itself, some of which are very prominent. But as a white person born and raised on the Canadian prairies, I cannot doubt the value or the significance of this approach. And I think it animates a lot of very important writing and art that's being produced today. So one kind of similarity that may not be overt between the two texts is that many of the works that I study in here as a figure also happen to be translingual. This is not necessarily kind of out in front, because it's not all of them, but many of the texts that I write about in here as a figure do include more than one language, but not necessarily in a way that suggests multiple fluencies for speakers within those works or readers of those works. So similar to the text that I studied in Translingual Poetics, when these works bring in or turn to languages other than English, there's often something Much more conflictual at play. So one of the texts that I talk about in here as a figure is Beth Pietote's verse play Antigone, which, as you can probably hear from the title, is an adaptation of Sophocles Antigone. And it's written in English and in the Nez Perce language, Nimi Potimt. And this is a language with very few fluent speakers. So in general, when that play is read or performed or viewed, this will be done by people for whom the Nez Perce language may be quite unfamiliar, or in some cases, such as when I've taught it, totally unfamiliar to the students. Now, part of Payetot's work in using this language in her writing is. Is toward this kind of broader effort at linguistic revitalization. But it will have other effects for people for whom that language is not something they're familiar with. So if I had written about that play in Translingual Poetics, my analysis probably would have really focused there on, like, what are the literary effects produced by either reading or performing or watching a performance where this language is very important if you do speak it, if you don't speak it, how is that sort of received? What are the effects that arise there? But since it hadn't been published yet when I wrote Translingual Poetics, and instead I write about it in Here Is a Figure, my focus instead is on the kind of challenge that Pietope presents to the sort of history of interpreting the play Antigone, which very much of that focuses on Antigone herself as a figure. But Pieto really shifts the focus to the two dead brothers in the Sophoclean Tragedy, although in her play they're other relatives, they're each other's brothers, but they're not Antigone's brothers, Eteocles and Polynicus, and they and the other people who are held in museum collections and are denied a proper burial, even to this present moment. This is a real world phenomenon. So she really shifts the focus there. And that's what I talk about in analyzing this play. So these two scholarly books do look at broadly, very similar texts, I think, texts that have some very significant formal features, but the focus of the analysis is quite different. And I think one thing that kind of strongly differentiates them is in Here as a figure. It's a more, I would say, overtly feminist analysis. Not that that wasn't part of what informed my approach in Translingual Poetics, but it wasn't, and it's explicitly engaged with feminist Theory, Whereas here as a figure is very much kind of in dialogue with a number of strands of feminist thought.
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A
It's interesting how you're talking about it in terms of sort of like implicitly foreground and what's at the front and what's at the back, because that's very important to this project as well. But as in this idea that there are these strands of thought that are in the work to a greater or lesser extent, explicit, but are kind of always animating your scholarship, that's really interesting. I mean, you talked there about the form that isn't a form. That's at the heart of this book. Book. In the first line of the book, actually, you offer a variation on your book's title. Here is a figure, and you write, here is a pattern. So I'm really interested to ask you about when and how you first started recognizing and organizing all of these lying down figures and putting them into a pattern, I suppose. And it made me think of them as a kind of row of paper dolls lying on the floor. What kinds of initial. Well, were there some specific examples, for instance, that you really started noticing, and what were some of the suppositions or hunches that you had about why this figure might be an important one in contemporary literature and art?
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C
Yeah. Thank you so much for asking about this. Yeah. As I mentioned, the idea for this book first came to me in about 2013 or 2014, and today I teach in the center for Comparative Literature. But the job I had before that was in an MFA in creative writing. And the classes that I taught there were really focused on what many funding bodies in a range of countries called research creation. So I know this isn't a term that circulates everywhere, but kind of what we did in those classes was we read a lot of theory, we read a lot of newly published literary work. We often did stuff in museums, really working across a range of genres and then writing or generating responses that were in some way analytical, but that really generally were not kind of straight academic literary criticism. So teaching in this context, I was trying to push myself to do some of the things that our students were being asked to do. I also had to teach prose writing. So that was a new thing for me. And I was trying to get out of my comfort zone and do things that I hadn't done before. So our MFA would bring in a lot of writers for a festival in the fall and an event in the spring, and then kind of a rolling reading series throughout the year. And then Seattle, where this was Located is a very kind of good literary city with a lot of things going on. So kind of having come into a new context, having moved across the country to teach in this, in this program, I was being exposed to a lot of writers that I hadn't encountered much or at all, and a lot of new work that was often not published yet. And it was in that context that I started to really think like, wow, all of you have these lying down characters or speakers in these texts that you're sharing. So just kind of having that exposure to a lot of new work, I really started to see like, this is kind of a strange commonality across people who are doing very different types of things. So, you know, Tisa Bryant came, Don Lundy Martin came, Ann Demarkin came, Renee Gladman came. They all had these kind of funny similarities of these recumbent characters and speakers in their text. So, you know, that made me think this could be worth investigating. There could really be something here. And I think initially I did just sort of have the sense that like, oh, these lying on the ground figures bringing to view how things are so bad right now in a sort of blunt way, like similarly to how you might see a picture of a victim in a newspaper or something like, there it is in front of your face. But as I read their work more carefully, that was not really a sustainable assumption because of course, I think I saw this most clearly with Tisa Bryant's book, which I didn't actually end up writing about in my book, but the way she will delve into these visual texts that she analyzes in her book, Unexplained Presence, really showed me how this figure could be a way of remediating very long histories of image making kind of chains of philosophical associations. It could do this kind of dialectical work of balancing this like total abjection with associations of rest and repose. And that really taught me a lot about sort of how and why one could approach these in a valuable way. So then it was just a matter of looking for them and reading more, I guess.
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A
It sounds like an amazing series.
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C
It was great. Yeah.
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Yeah. So you make the. At the start of the book, you talk about the way these prone and recumbent figures, and perhaps this is one of the things that as you were working more and more this came into view the way that they're launching a kind of broader, like philosophical postural challenge, I suppose, to the kinds of dominant images of the human in Western thought that are these upright figures, figures of ascendancy, you know, the Human as a being that stands. I found that really interesting, and I thought it'd be interesting to ask you to just share how that opposition works. So what's entailed in the image of the upright person as compared to the one who's been laid low or who chooses to lay low?
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C
Yeah, I really like how you phrased that question because, um, the point is to think about these kind of images and figures, right? Not to think about the kind of deep, true meaning of standing up or lying down, which most people are able to occupy those positions or come out of that ability at different points in their lives. And, you know, that's interesting from some perspectives, but it's not really what I'm talking about here. What I'm interested in is how these images have kind of crystallized and the meanings that occur have accrued to them over time. So there is some really interesting work on uprightness, some of which has come out kind of more recently. And I wasn't able to talk about in my book because it was published around the same time, but some of which is older. So, like a couple of interesting histories of uprightness that I could direct people towards. Might be. Beth Linker has a really interesting book called Slouch Posture in Modern America. Or a book that I did consult was Sandra Gilman's Stand Up Straight, A History of Posture. And both of these books look at things like the history of eugenics, militarism, anthropology, medicine, public education. And they really show how uprightness is kind of postural and moral at the same time, and it comes to be equated with a kind of optimal humanness. So obviously this does have a much longer history, as your question was sort of pointing toward like bipedalism is often thought to distinguish humans and make us different from all other animals, even though quite a lot of animals are also bipedal. But nonetheless, you know, it's always our uprightness is understood to make us special and different and closer to God in some contexts and all these different kinds of things. So as I was kind of thinking about this laid low figure and its contrast to this upright figure, one text that I really read very intensively was Adriana Cavarero's book, A Critique of Rectitude. So she's a philosopher, and in that book she's looking at the political and kind of ethical significance of vertical posture. And the critique she makes is that if we're thinking of a self that is independent, like in literal terms, it requires no structural support. This kind of leads us down A bad ethical path because not relying or turning toward other figures is not particularly a virtue. Right. So she gives this alternate image. She looks at representations of things like the Madonna bending over her child and thinks about this as this leading figure as a way to kind of draw out a more sort of ethically oriented image of the human. So there's also a lot of work from a kind of wide array of authors and critical ethnic studies that looks at whiteness in particular in terms of ascendancy. So that might be people like Jasbir Puar, Zakiyah, Iman Jackson, Tiffany Lethabo King. So there's this really kind of broad, but I would say very diffuse array of scholarship that's interested in uprightness or upright figures. And I was kind of wanting to work like in juxtaposition to that. Like that upright figure has its problems and its limitations, so does the lying down one. And there's a kind of tension there that they're sort of playing off of each other. So I think, though, when I was trying to understand what was happening with these lying down figures, they were often kind of sending me toward particular kind of high art or high literary histories as a way of making their meaning. So, for instance, there have been a number of kind of writing throughs of Manet's famous Olympia painting over the past couple of decades, or when I would look at something like the poet Anne Boyer's work about her cancer treatment, she's very engage with the history of philosophy. So some of the kind of main associations that came out through this analysis is that when we're seeing these kind of recumbent bodies in contemporary literary texts, one very, very strong kind of inescapable association is with the art historical odalisque. So these paintings from the kind of European 19th century of women, not always nude, but often nude, kind of laid out. And these often tend to mediate or metabolize particular racial structures. Another very strong association is that in modernism there's this great tradition of texts about being ill and convalescing. So we can think of people like Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, Proust. We can think of the kind of invention of the psychoanalytic talking here, this recumbent person. So in a way, this figure doesn't get us out of the sort of big histories that that upright man does. In fact, it's almost like snobbly turning around these very kind of high art, high literary associations. But at the same time, when we look at the work of people like Anne Boyer or Johanna Hedva, they're thinking very directly about their own political situations. And these lying down figures are also very explicitly evoking protest choreography from groups like ACT up, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or other political movements that use lying down or sleeping in public as a strategy of land defense or occupation. So 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, other associations like this. So what I really wanted to think about was not just upright, bad, laid flat good, but to kind of figure out where the associations that were making up this figure were coming from and how those associations were kind of being mobilized or recirculated or recoded when that figure would appear anew in these very recent texts.
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A
I think you get a sense from that really rich and capacious answer, Sarah, just the level of kind of interdisciplinary knowledge and research that's gone into this book. It's really remarkable. There's also a way that its archive is also quite multimedia. I suppose you kind of move between a whole range of different types of texts. There's lots of different literary genres, from poetry to novels and plays. But you also explore, in a really expert way, a range of performance art, other visual art forms, as you've suggested there as well. With the history of the Odalesque, too, I was struck by certain moments as well where I think I just really like certain types of book history or attention to the book object. And so moments in your analysis really jumped out at me where you open up your understanding of the literary text in question through a really fascinating close reading, for instance, of an image of a supine figure on the COVID of the book in question. And so I thought it could be interesting. Maybe you could give our listeners a taste of the kinds of texts you discuss and the way that you approach them. The book, by talking us through one of those instances where a cover image really crystallised certain aspects of the way the book was engaging this figure, of the prone kind of lying down person.
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C
Yeah, sure. I'm very happy to talk about this, and I'm very appreciative of the question. You're right. There are a couple of places where I talk quite a bit about the COVID of a particular book as a way into the text. And these are when I discuss Banu Kappel's experimental prose work, Ban on Valieux, and when I discuss Leanne Bedasmosak Simpson's novel no. The Cure for White Ladies. Both of these have a recumbent nude on the COVID In both cases a woman. And in both cases, rather than looking out at the person holding the book, at the viewer, as odalisks quite often do, they're turned away so that we can't see their faces. And maybe in the interest of highlighting interdisciplinarity, I'll focus on the COVID of Nopeming, because in that case, what appears on the COVID is an independent and separate artwork, not something that seems to have been created for the purpose of the book itself, as is, I believe, the case with the COVID of Bain en Banlieu. So on the COVID of Nopeming is an artwork called Fringe, which was created by the artist Rebecca Belmore, like Leanne Bedasmusag Simpson, who wrote the novel Dalmor is Anishinaabe. So, as I said, this is a photograph of a nude woman who's lying on her side. She's facing away from the viewer, and she has a white sheet that's covering her hips and her buttocks. So it. It looks a bit clinical. She's on a very flat surface with this. It's not the kind of white sheet that a person might have at home. It looks crisp. And what stands out more than that, though, is that this woman has this huge diagonal cut running across the full length of her back. And you can see that it's been stitched up very tightly to close the wound. When you look either quickly or from far away, it appears as though some kind of ribbons of blood are dripping out of this big cut. But if you look more closely, you see that it's actually not blood at all. It's these strands of. Of string with red beads on them, and they're forming a kind of fringe that dangles from the cut. Anyone in Canada, I think, who's engaged with feminist politics or people who are engaged with Indigenous politics in North America or elsewhere probably would recognize this artwork very quickly and readily. 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 Kickton. He is a person who would eventually disclose that he had killed 49 women, of whom a very high number were Indigenous. And his case was also particularly notorious because many people in the Vancouver area had long known that someone was targeting vulnerable women and disappearing them. And the police were extremely slow to respond, even when very good evidence presented itself. So they had many opportunities to stop him at an earlier time and did not take those so for many audiences, this cover image is a very recognizable artwork that, you know, kind of performs the function of slotting the text on which it graces the COVID into particular conversations. It's a very significant intertext for the novel that it envelops. But, you know, for me, it's not just that it's cool that there is this coincidence, but actually, I think this particular work of Belmore's and her kind of broader oeuvre gives us some very important tools and strategies for approaching some of the things that happen in the novel. Nopeming. So, for instance, in this novel, there's a lot of discussion of blankets and tarps, and these are also very important materials for Belmore in her own artistic work. And the curator, Kathleen Ritter has written a lot about how recumbency features across Belmore's body of work. So a lot of the things that Belmore kind of does or works with in her artistic practice also appear in Nopeming as kind of recurring important things, let's say. So reading between that novel and the kind of broader oeuvre of this visual artist gives us a very useful way of kind of thinking about what's happening in the novel. Of course, you don't need to be familiar with that to enjoy it. It's a very interesting and beautiful and funny novel. But once you kind of delve into what appears on the COVID and put that in dialogue with what happens in the text, it becomes very rich. So, at least at the beginning of the novel, it's narrated by this figure named Mashkawaje, who's lying frozen in the ice of Lake Ontario. And the explanation given for this is that tragedy happened again. So we can almost picture that the speaker in these opening passages is in some way a figure like the one who appears on the COVID of the book. But that image also kind of cues us to see that this frozen figure who suffered a tragedy is not kind of merely or only or simply a victim. So for me, one of the most important things about Belmore's work, Fringe, is that the beading that appears on the woman's back coming out of her cut is very conspicuously unfinished. There's these kind of curling loose ends of string or fishing line that. That almost seem as though you could touch them. They're. They're curling toward the viewer. And her work in general is very reliant on language, puns, expressions. So there's this very clear sense of kind of tying up loose ends, like there's more to be done. But there's also the implication Therefore, that someone has been doing it. You know, there's no way this woman could reach around and do this to her own back. And I think this is kind of a way to think about what's being narrated in the novel. Nopeming. It's telling the story of people who are taking care of each other, trying to survive, trying to make art, trying to get by right here in Ontario, really, through and against all the ways that our settler society makes this so difficult for indigenous people. But they are doing it in very exciting ways throughout the novel. And I think the kind of intertext with Belmore's Friends really brings that fully into view. And it really makes it clear that this novel is also kind of part of that collective project of working together to regenerate and revitalize culture and produce new things and contribute to kind of flourishing and ongoingness. And you really see that it. It's not just one person's unique creation. It has this very strong dialogue with another artist working in another medium. So, you know, I think often in a kind of academic context, we do really silo the way we think about influence. For instance, you know, literature comes from literature. But I think allowing myself to talk about the COVID image made me see, like, oh, this is just factual. Like, these are two artists who literally have conversations with each other. So of course it would make sense that we can think about what the substance of that might be and how it might impact the works that they produce.
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A
Yeah, I love that totally. As someone who works across literature and visual culture very broadly and including on people who themselves work across different mediums, this is kind of something I'm really passionate about as well. The ways that we can underestimate or misunderstand certain types of artistic practices, I suppose, because they fall between the gaps in those disciplinary silos, essentially. Yeah, I really love that reading of the COVID image, and especially the way you draw attention to the kind of conspicuous other who has been involved in making this ribbon or in kind of tying it together, at least partially. And it makes me think that also works as a metaphor for what you've described as a kind of artistic partnership between an artist and a writer that you then kind of activate through your reading. It's really fascinating. I wanted to ask you now about, I guess, the feminist stakes of the book, which you mentioned was more of an overt aspect of this book as compared to your previous study. I was really struck reading the book by how your attention to figures on the ground and also the grounding of those figures intervenes in these broader questions in feminist studies more generally and in kind of interdisciplinary feminist studies about the possibilities and the forms of political agency for minoritized people. One of the things that your host of recumbent figures, I'm calling them yours, you own them now, these recumbent figures, they invite and they do make a lot of invitations and demands on us, which I think we'll talk about a little more, I hope, in a moment. But one of the things that they invite us to do is to expand our sense of what counts as oppositional or defensive or political action per se, and also to then kind of include minor actions or non actions in those things. But it also, this approach, though for you doesn't license a simple or sentimentalised recuperation of lying down as necessarily political. Like you said earlier, you know, it's not like standing up bad, lying down good, you know. And in fact, if anything, many of the texts you discuss, you see as declining specifically to offer the sense of closure or repair or redemption that is essentially required by liberal humanist models of political action, and specifically feminist action. I think, too. So would you share a little more about this aspect of your argument? And I especially wanted to invite you to reflect on what it means that some of these contemporary texts, in your words, put agency on its lowest setting.
- [38:39]
C
Yeah, I would be happy to talk about this, and I appreciate the way you asked the question, because there are some of the texts that I talk about in this book where I think the gesture of lying down is kind of consciously and deliberately apolitical, or at least can be viewed as such. Like in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, she seems to be sort of opting out, and a reader can attempt to read politics onto that, but the narrator's desire to sleep for a year is explicitly a gesture of disengagement. But in many of the other texts, as I was saying before, the same position is explicitly connected to protests. So it's not that lying down is political or apolitical, good or bad, but it's how these different representations of recumbency tap into these debates that you mentioned about what kind of constitutes action, which oftentimes are feminist debates. So a lot of my approach to this is kind of drawing on the intersections of feminist and disability politics and theories. So one important essay that I cite is Susan Wendell's unhealthy disabled from 2021. And in this piece she quite famously critiques the modes of feminist practice that assume a consistently energetic and high functioning body and mind and she also points out that much of what counts as feminist organizing takes place in public. Now bear in mind, because she wrote this in 2021, this would perhaps be phrased differently now, but this assumption that politics is kind of high energy in public, everybody sort of healthy and circulating, that was a very important critique when it came out. Another piece that kind of makes a similar type of critique, but from the perspective of artistic practice rather than feminist philosophy, is Johanna Hedva's Sick Woman Theory, which made a very big splash when it came out. And it's an essay that kind of talks through how and to what extent people who have disabilities that keep them within their homes are able to participate in politics. Particularly, she's thinking about very like overt forms of direct action. Another person I'm drawing on is the philosopher Elsa Darlay, who's interested in violence and self defense and in how particular populations are made defenseless and what forms of defense do they practice from their enforced defenselessness. And I would really recommend her book Self Defense to anyone who's interested in these questions. It's fascinating. So I think the lying down figure is often one that is made defenseless in Darlin's sense. So it provokes us to ask what we can do and not do within the violence that surrounds us. So in other words, 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. But in many instances it's also a very highly oppositional figure and a figure kind of even for provocation. So, you know, particularly in the cases where an author, say, like Capill is drawing on protest, or in the cases where there's a very kind of in your face, very provocative gesture of revealing a particular form of violence by kind of throwing the body down in front of us. What these figures tend to highlight is the ways that our bodies are traversed by violence and how that both requires us to act, because it's a kind of moral or political imperative to do so, but also it is something that restricts our capacity for action at the same time. And really this is a big part of why I've been so interested in writing about procedural or instructional writing, because I think it throws down quite a similar gauntlet with regard to action. So many of the texts that I look at in the book are these kind of instruction based forms that come out of a variety of sort of mid century traditions. And one might read them and do absolutely nothing and just enjoy it as a little poem or something, which is. Is a common way to read that work. But if you're looking at something like the history, say, of Fluxes or something like that, oftentimes people receive the instructions that these artists produce and do kind of then make their own version of the work, whether that's public or just them kind of messing around on their own. So as a kind of parallel strand to these conversations in feminist philosophy or in disability theory and politics, I think there's a sort of strange parallel or set of kind of constellations with procedural writing that it kind of invites us to consider how one action prompts or causes another, what the effects of any action may be, these kind of possibilities of continuing an idea or a work or a practice in very unpredictable ways. I think this is a really interesting tradition for thinking about action in. In a sort of philosophical sense, it's very impractical, but for that reason, it gives us these kind of interestingly contained ways of contemplating what's possible under a given set of constraints. And there's a kind of utility to that, surprisingly, to my mind at least.
- [45:30]
A
That's so interesting. Yeah. I think, you know, across the book, when you're talking about questions of agency or action, questions of voice are never far away as well. And I think your example there of instructional or procedural writing is a key example of that. So where readers are being called to contemplate or even to enact certain actions or gestures. There's also so many poems as well that you discussed that are written wholly or in part in the second person. And in fact, as I was reading your book, I thought you could recast this whole book as a sort of extended meditation of the power and the implications of the second person. So often does it appear in the mouths of these recumbent figures. And obviously, the recumbent figure is often one who is silent or apparently silent. But if that figure was to have a characteristic voice, I think it would definitely be the second person. So the use of a you that is hailing another person or implicating another person, and more specifically, you make a claim for the value of thinking about the second person plural. Right. Which is so nice. As an Australian, we've got like yous, which plays that role. So I really liked that. But this idea of kind of you as a dilatory figure, right. That expands outward and then gathers. Gathers up a group of individuals into a collective formation. And then, of course, there's your own gestures towards a kind of second person address. In the book, too, where you also give the reader kind of overt instructions or at least suggestions at different points in the book. And in fact, the gap between, I think all of the like, when you've got sections in the chapters, for instance, those gaps are bridged by these imperative statements that you make. So an example is in the introduction. One section ends with the incomplete phrase, re attuned, we might. And there's a kind of cliff where a kind of punctuation mark should be. And then the sentence is picked up in the title of the next section. Configure the ground as a medium of thought and action. So, you know, then we piece that back together, re attuned, we might configure the ground and so on. So I really wanted to ask you about this conceit and how it relates to these second person demands or invitations for action that you see as being made by the recumbent figures that you study. And perhaps if you could share a little about what this conceit tells us about your approach or your aims in the book.
- [48:02]
C
Yeah, thank you for asking about this. The book does have, I guess, some enjambment, and it offers some instructions. And these are kind of indebted to the procedural traditions as well as to the Manifesto as a genre. And as I was saying earlier, when I first started writing this book, I was confronting the necessity of teaching prose writing in a sort of experimental context. So I wanted to kind of push myself in the prose genre that I typically work in, which is literary criticism, to think of some ways to kind of experiment with its possibilities. I guess I should also say that many of the teachers that I've had over the years themselves wrote quite unorthodox literary criticism, or in some cases, published quite unorthodox literary criticism. So I studied with Rachel Blau du Plessis during my ma, and I think her essays and books like the Pink Guitar are among the most formally astonishing that I've ever come across. Class during my ma, I also had Jenna Osman as a teacher, and she had us reading things like Joan Retallic's the Poetical Wager and Juliana Spahr's Spider Wasp or Literary Criticism. And then during my PhD, I was working with Charles Bernstein, whose critical prose is very unique. And I was reading people like Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman. So in some ways, I feel that in comparison to all of them, this book is actually maybe pretty straight prose wise. But there are these certain things that it does, particularly around those kind of modes of enjambment. That you talked about and these kind of oblique instructions that it offers to you, whoever you may be, and that you. Is a kind of long standing fixation or frustration of mine or indexes to that, maybe I could say. I often feel that in many corners it seems as though talking about yourself is the only way that people can imagine pushing the boundaries and doing something new. And I do think talking about yourself can be quite important. But sometimes the sort of modes of writing that fall under the auto prefix tend to get a little bit automatic to me. And I just kind of hope that we have other ways to also push the sentence or the paragraph or the section or the address that we need to have a kind of broader toolkit for thinking about what would constitute an interesting experiment. So I do talk about myself in this book and when I commute to work and things like that. But what I thought, sorry, I was.
- [51:07]
A
Going to say as well, even I was noticing the way you would bring in references to classroom experiences, which I really like, because that was a way of talking about your experience, sort of. But it's kind of motivated by your encounter with the text and the conditions by which you've kind of come to understand it. And not just you, but you in a community among students and that kind of thing. Yeah, but just another example of the way you do that.
- [51:31]
C
Yeah, yeah. I think that's such a relevant thing to mention is that. That it does tend to be in these kind of collective modes that I will bring in my own experience. Like me and the other people on the train car or me in the classroom figuring out this text with other people. And I think the kind of expanding second person plural to my mind hopefully could perform a similar function to those. Like in a way, perhaps it's very literal. But the kind of shifting of focus from the eye 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. Like this was another way that I could investigate and pursue ideas related to horizontality as opposed to defaulting to my own independent, free from dependencies, grammatical, upstanding. I like. I really wanted to turn outward and away from that, or at least to have the two of them in a kind of tension and relationship with one another. That that separate eye cannot exist without its sort of broader, capacitating context.
- [53:01]
A
Totally. I think it's really nice and I like the way that you're thinking about different creative, critical kind of gestures that don't prop up as you say, that Kind of upright eye. I like that kind of visual image there. I wanted to ask you a bit more about this, actually, and particularly the way that your approach is trying to do a kind of horizontal scholarship that is pitched against a certain kind of. Well, as you say, that is not detached and is not disconnected from other people, other people's expertise and knowledge or other. The kind of conditions of the work as well, like sort of locating it in the ground of its own kind of production, I suppose, because that is part of what you see, I think these. The challenge of these figures being is that in some cases it's a kind of theoretical question of what would it mean to join these figures on the ground or to stand in their place, even if that's kind of a risky kind of position to be in. But that involves turning away from certain scholarly conventions of things like detachment or mastery or whatever. You put it really nicely in the introduction. I might just briefly cite you, if you don't mind. To you. But you write, the figures I examine challenge our still dominant practices of detached aesthetic contemplation grounded in notions of perspective that privilege the outward looking eyes of the standing figure. Figures on the ground exemplify and encourage alternative modes of engagement in failing or refusing to transcend and distinguish themselves from the ground on which they live. They lie. They present different possibilities for attunement and inclination. And then later, in a chapter where you directly discuss procedural writing, which you've just mentioned, you suggest further that recumbent figures break us out of our habits of detached interpretation, requiring us to engage in practices of situated doing, whether actual or imaginative, and hence to think more expansively about what kinds of activities interpretation itself includes, end quote. So, yeah, I've got so many questions about this. I really want to hear you talk about it a little more. But I wondered if you could share about your experience of trying to make scholarship from the ground, what that felt like, what it involved. Did you undertake any experiments yourself with reading or researching or writing while lying down? Were there any particular decisions? I mean, you've already talked about some, I think, and even the way you've been citing other scholars and the way you do citation in the book, I think, is part of this kind of doing scholarship on the ground. For me, it was anyway. But certain aspects of the argument, I suppose, and I wonder too, how the ground of your own work came into view as you undertook this research and writing.
- [55:57]
C
Yeah, thank you. This is such a great question. I'm afraid I might disappoint you in telling you that in trying to make scholarship from a grounded position, I was not super literal. So I didn't do any experiments and lying down while writing or anything like that. But I was very overtly trying to write kind of out of a community or peer group. So I was in that sense very committed to a kind of scholarly production where 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 and writing in a way in which I imagined myself more as in. In a kind of lateral position. To some of the poets in particular that I wanted to respond to. I certainly don't know everyone that I wrote about, but two of the authors that I write about in the book were co workers of mine for a period of time. For example. And in one case, in the case of Liz Howard, I did speak to her about whether she thought this was all right for me to respond to this particular poem of hers and to put it kind of front and center in my work, if that was something that she felt comfortable with or would be happy about. And she was very generous with me in sharing some of her own thoughts about that particular poem, which do come into the way that I write about it. So, you know, in some cases I did kind of speak to the person whose work I was responding to and take their own sort of sense of what they were doing into account in the way that I was writing about it. And I think, you know, since. Since this was not a project that came from a dissertation, I didn't feel under a lot of pressure to focus on kind of of big name, big press, well known authors, but really to kind of foreground people from sort of within a community, in some cases also within a geographical area that I share, to kind of proceed from the assumption that 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, and as we have been talking about a little bit, I wanted to be somewhat expansive in the sense of what could kind of count as an interpretive activity. So even though I didn't, you know, try to do a lying down, close reading where I, you know, put myself in some uncomfortable spot to see what might happen. Although I do think those can be quite limitating at times, it just wasn't particularly what I was doing here. But my teaching, as you said before, comes into this book quite a bit. And the kind of situated practices of doing that I engage in the classroom are quite Important especially because so many of the texts I talk about here involve other languages. It's really great to teach them because some people know things that I don't and they can kind of bring that to bear. Or, you know, when my students were reading Nopeming in one of our classes, it's set largely in Toronto. So a lot of them took it upon themselves to go to places where various events unfold in the novel and kind of be in that particular space to think about how that helped them to understand the novel a bit differently. I don't think I cite her in the book, but Julietta Singh's work on mastery has been very important to me in thinking through these things. You know, there can be a lot of very interesting and useful ideas that come from the sort of non expert position. And sometimes I think it can sort of read as false modesty or something like that when, you know, tenured professors are declaring themselves to be inexpert in various things. But it's true that we don't know everything. And especially if you write about things that are kind of emergent and don't have a large scholarly corpus of other people's work to sort of justify their importance, you know, there. There is an element of kind of testing new ground or something like that.
- [61:12]
A
And kind of like even just holding onto a certain type of provisionality that I don't think it's necessary to sort of. I mean, anyone who reads this book is going to be very, very. It's very obvious that you are an expert, right? Like they're beautiful readings. Like it's an incredible archive. It's an enormous amount of work that's gone into it. And I don't think. I don't get the sense it's like sort of false modesty or trying to pretend that's not true. But there's a way that I think there's an openness here that is so aware of this as being one part of a larger conversation of a number of different ways this project could have gone. Right. Like a kind of positive sense of provisionality that suggests the way that we're contributing to something much larger than ourselves through the scholarly endeavor, through the critical endeavor.
- [62:00]
C
Yeah, I really like that description. I'm very relieved also that that makes your sense reading it, because I do think there could be a lot of other projects that would just be about other texts. And here and there I try to gesture what I think some of them might be. Like at one point I sort of say someone could write a very interesting book about the kind of modernist recumbency. I'm not going to, but I would love to read it. You know, there. There are these sort of other paths that. That I hope other people might take and would enjoy taking, whether just as a kind of reading project or as a sort of fully fledged critical project, or as. As a. As a class they might teach or something like that. I think I wanted it to be open that there would be other kind of ways of continuing the ideas.
- [62:58]
A
I thought we'd conclude today's conversation by discussing another really important aspect of this book, which is its investment in thinking through the stakes and the effects of art in the world. You've kind of mentioned this already. I suppose. There's a really interesting aspect of this book is the way it draws in sort of real world experiences, actions you've talked already about, things like people who've been denied proper burial, about different structures of protest, different strategies of protest and opposition, that kind of thing. And they appear at numerous points in this book, illuminating sort of the real world points of contact, I suppose, in relation to the topics and texts that you're discussing. But the question of art's relation to politics really does animate much of the work here. And I think that's largely because. Because for you, the recumbent figure is always drawing attention to the ground that holds her. Those specific historical conditions, material environments that kind of situate her lying down, I suppose. And I was struck by your description of the book in the introduction as a work of passionate advocacy and even excitement for literature and for literary criticism, and with a particular emphasis on experimental forms of literary work or countercultural writing. So I wanted to ask about how the process of researching, writing and publishing this book might have augmented or shifted your sense of the value of literature, of art and of criticism as well.
- [64:40]
C
Thank you for asking about that. In some ways, this is a difficult question to answer. Not because I have any mixed feelings about the value of these things. I think, if anything, the process of bringing the book into existence have made me feel. Has made me feel even more acutely how precious these practices of art making and writing and publishing and criticism really are. And it is very much a work of advocacy and excitement, as you said at the end of the introduction, I ask a question that I often ask my students in our kind of intro to graduate school type class, the one that they take in the first term. In her article, the Race for Theory, Barbara Christian asks, for whom are we doing what we do when we do literary criticism? And I think this is a Question that we could all stand to ask ourselves more often, you know, that there should be a kind of not just sense of purpose, but also a certain kind of accountability, I think. And for me, in this book, I wanted to be very accountable to the authors, to the publishers of the work, to the communities of readers, to the sort of broader network of writers that I feel myself to be a part of. And, you know, I think, as we all know, it's quite a difficult time to be engaged in these types of endeavors with the sort of funding cuts and tightening of budgets in universities and in the arts sector. I do feel very concerned for what might happen, not just for kind of academic literary criticism, but also for broader structures around writing and publishing and for people's capacity to participate and engage in that. That was one reason that I really wanted this book to come out with a press that doesn't publish only scholarly work, but that also publishes a lot of fiction and poetry and drama, and has a kind of reach into those types of communities. So I was very happy to be able to work with Northwestern on the project because I felt a kind of sense of alignment in the way they think about things and in the way that I do. And when I look kind of historically at the ways that even kind of university based literary critics have been able to position themselves to generate that kind of excitement for public culture, whether it's literary or in other artistic spheres, I think even as people today often are very excited about the modes of public writing or public facing scholarship that we can do now, it still feels constrained to me, compared to say, in Canada in the 60s or the 70s, how even people who are often imagined as quite fusty, we're really talking about contemporary writing or other modes of cultural production in a public way. And their capacity to connect with an audience was really facilitated by the funding structures and the media apparatus of the time. And that was very good for the culture in general. So, you know, I think it's important to kind of be an advocate for the things that, that you think are important as a scholar and a thinker. But I also think, you know, one of the reasons that I like being a poet and a person who goes to poetry readings is it's a way that people get in a room together. You know, the writing is in some ways the important thing, but actually people who are very different, showing up to the same place and paying attention to things together, and talking before and after the reading, and often engaging in political discussions of various types, or listening to someone's analysis of whatever political issue, written in verse or in prose, whatever the case may be. I think these are really important sites of kind of intellectual exchange, public participation, not just artistic creation. And I really see my work, not just in this book, but in a kind of broad, general sense, as contributing to the flourishing of that. 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. So, yeah, that's what I hope that my work can do. And that's how I kind of imagine its role, I guess I would say.
- [70:25]
A
Yeah, I really appreciate the sort of forthrightness, I suppose, with which you name your commitments and your passions, I suppose, in this book. And I hope that this conversation as well will draw many new readers to this book and to your work more generally. And here's to many more poetry readings, or even just conversations conducted remotely like this one. You know, where we get a chance to really reflect deeply on the work that we're doing as critics and scholars, and in your case, as an artist as well as a poet. Thank you so much, Sarah, for sharing so openly and honestly about this fascinating book. It's out now from Northwestern University Press, as you said. So please, everyone, go out and buy a copy. Get one for your library if you have access to a local library or an institutional one. Thank you, Sarah, so much for your time today.
- [71:14]
C
Thank you so much for having me. This has been really a pleasure and a joy.
- [71:18]
A
Me, too. I'm Alex Beast, and you're listening to new books in film and literary studies. I hope you'll join me next time.