The Matter of Tragedy: Reading with Water

Abstract

This article proposes a "matter-realist" reading of tragedy: starting from Alice Oswald's 2019 Nobody, a poem about water based on the Odyssey and the Oresteia, and from the feminist phenomenologist acknowledgment that "we are bodies of water" (Neimanis 2017), my paper argues for the importance of taking water at face value. It focuses on water metaphors and metonymies in the tragic corpus and shows how these images, on the one hand, reveal something fundamental about embodiment, identity, and situatedness, and, on the other, betray the power of water to trickle into form and language itself, often usurping their logic with its own.