Work and Contemporary Literature - Here is the Figure with Sarah Dowling

Join senior seminar and graduate class “Work and Contemporary Literature” for three discussions on new books about work. Authors will join virtually.

Sarah Dowling, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at University of Toronto, will discuss Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form (Northwestern University Press, 2024).

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.

This mini-series is organized by the Department of English and co-sponsored by the Dresher Center; the Department of American Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture program.