Troubling the Waters: Porous Materiality, Contaminated Environments, and Female Bodies of Water in Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Undine geht,” Yoko Tawada’s Das Bad, and Katharina Köller’s Was ich im Wasser sah
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Date
2024-01-09
Authors
Hoeller, Lisa
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In my dissertation, I examine water—watery environments, fluid materialities, bodies of water—in literature and environmental theory. I argue that literary texts offer creative and imaginative ways to engage with environmental concepts such as hybridity, indifference, viscous porosity, impurity, and monstrosity. Attempting to address the multiple climate crises of today, many environmental theories demand a radical rethinking of how we view the world and our place in it; connecting such theories with literary analysis creates opportunities to envision how futures in which we more fully account for the material contingency of embodied existence might take shape.I offer a close reading of three German literary texts that center around water, Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Undine geht,” Yoko Tawada’s Das Bad, and Katharina Köller’s Was ich im Wasser sah. Bachmann’s 1961 narrative “Undine geht” imaginatively attunes itself to the watery milieu of Undine, abandoning the anthropocentric terrestrial perspective in favor of a more fluid and hybrid point of view. The text makes clear that we exist in a world of entanglement and partial knowledge and can never truly separate ourselves from our surroundings. Tawada’s Das Bad, first published in 1989, offers a complex exploration of watery bodies and unstable materiality. More than that, Tawada’s writing is itself porous and materially contingent; how we make sense is always connected to our sense as well as our senses. Finally, Köller’s 2020 novel Was ich im Wasser sah highlights how ideas of intactness and purity are unable to account for the material realities of interconnected and contingent existence. Instead, Köller writes about pervasive contamination and its resultant monstrosity to imagine ways of engaging with our own impure existence.
Focusing on troubled waters, the literary stories discussed in my thesis make their own contribution to the environmental humanities. Connecting them with concepts of environmental theory helps bring their contributions to light and allows for a deeper understanding of our entangled existence in this world.
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Keywords
entanglement, environmental humanities, German literature, German women writers, materiality, water