Here Is a Figure
Grounding Literary Form

Sarah Dowling (Author)

9780810147904, Northwestern University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2024

184 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.2 cm, 0.454 kg

“Sarah Dowling is one of the most innovative and intelligent literary theorists writing today.”—Craig Perez Santos, author of From Unincorporated Territory [Åmot]

“Here is a Figure invites us to occupy grounding and grounded figures, lining itself up with the invitations to take the place of, to lie down and alongside of, to lie with which define Dowling's fabulous archive. An engaging, accessible work of interdisciplinary criticism.”—Jennifer Doyle, author of Shadow of My Shadow

A study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature

The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures’ refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.