Road to Nowhere: The Mobility of Oedipus and the Task of Interpretation

This article draws on a close reading of the language of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to explore how the text problematizes concepts of place, space, and movement through the ambiguous figure of Oedipus. Considering Oedipus’ role in the play as well as in the Western intellectual tradition as an archetypal reader of signs and interpreter of riddles, the essay goes on to investigate how Oedipus’ literal and figurative mobility reveals the elusiveness and instability that conditions not only our interpretation of the play, but also the practice of interpretation writ large.