Within the pulse of water : posthuman poetics and rhythmic reading

Abstract

Water, in its ceaseless flow, has not only carved landscapes but shaped the contours of our imaginaries. This dissertation develops a “hydro-rhythmic method” to explore how water’s material and metaphorical movements sculpt literary form, ripple through temporal experience, and open tidal passages toward affective and ethical entanglement. It proposes a poetics of liquid interbeing, where the human dissolves into the more-than-human and certainties drift and reform in the swell of the hydrocommons. Drawing on Astrida Neimanis’s “bodies of water”, I argue that literary rhythm—formal, imagistic, physiological, and affective—functions as an aesthetic and epistemic trigger, attuning readers to fluid interconnection. Through rhythm-attuned close readings of Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, I trace how literary rhythm does not merely represent water but enacts its pulse across physiological, psychological, and emotional registers, queering normative chronologies and surfacing submerged histories. Hydro-rhythmic reading thus gestures toward a posthuman narratology and an ethics of attunement: an ongoing responsiveness to shifting rhythms of relation that unsettles colonial and heteronormative temporalities while opening narrative studies to more fluid, affective, and planetary futures, cultivating a tidal intimacy that binds vulnerability and care within the ever-pulsing hydrocommons.