Figure and Ground: the body as a locus of narrative and knowing

This paper investigates the way bodies and language are intertwined, examining how illness or trauma require us to speak from the body in different terms from those of orthodox academic research or Cartesian epistemologies. The paper looks at ways in which the body, particularly in illness, may be a site of transformation and a means for re-conceptualising epistemology and narrative. The fictional and factual, or indeed, factional book I have written over the last three years, South: a psychometric text adventure, is committed to an investigation of alternative forms of knowing that are grounded in material practices, such as the generation of meaning through sensory experiences. Readers are invited to construct their own narrative interpretations through touch, sound and movement, to locate themselves within and through the environment. This paper will demonstrate how my work makes an explicit connection between subjectivity, epistemology and location, citing Grosz (1994) and Quartararo in Van Cleve (1999) as theorists on the role of both embodied and environmentally situated knowledge production, but also describing the specific practices I have developed and through which I have generated alternative forms of knowing and narrative within the South system. I have also drawn upon my own family history to situate and frame my relationship to issues of embodiment and narrative, showing how two of my grandparents experienced formative (and historically significant) restrictions upon their languages. These family histories, as this paper will outline, have significantly informed my construction of this work