English 7087Petrofictions

Classes: Wednesdays 10.00-1.00 in A3033

Instructor: Dr. Fiona PolackOffice location: A3006

Phone: 864-8055Email: fpolack@mun.ca

Course Description:Informed by the rapidly emerging field of the Energy Humanities, this course examines literary figurations of the most important energy source of the twentieth and (so far) twenty-first centuries: petroleum. Students will consider texts from around the world in which oil and its industries are an explicit concern. However, thinking about oil also necessitates looking beyond just the more visible (often intensely contested and violent) aspects of its production. As Imre Szeman notes, “petrocarbons structure contemporary social life...oil is ontology, the structuring ‘Real’ or our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary.” Thus, we will also read work that addresses the ways in which petroleum is entrenched within our everyday lives. In addition, we will think about texts which, taking seriously the imperative of climate change, speculate about new modes of human existence after oil.

Required texts

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Tony Birch, BloodEric Conway and Naomi Oreskes, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the FutureBarbara Kingsolver, Flight BehaviorHelon Habila, Oil on Water John McGrath, The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black OilAbdelrahman Munif, Cities of SaltUpton Sinclair, Oil!Sina Queyras, Expressway

AssessmentAt the graduate level it is taken for granted you will attend every class, always have the required reading completed on time, and participate fully in class discussions. Not meeting these basic expectations will make it exceedingly difficult to pass the course. The formal components of your assessment are as follows:

1. Two seminar presentations = 40% (first paper =15%, second = 25%)

2. Major paper (4000 words) = 50% Due 7 April

3. Collaborative project = 10% Due 5 April

1. Seminar presentations Students will present two oral presentations, each of around 30 minutes, on a pre-assigned text. Whenever two people are scheduled to speak on the same book, the presenters should meet well in advance to determine that their respective approaches will be unique. Please inform me by email at least three days before your seminar about the direction you have chosen to take.

Your seminar should be geared at critically interrogating and engaging with your reading. Do not simply provide a summary of it. Good presentations are well researched, clearly focused and original. Seminar talks will be followed by class discussion, which you should be prepared to spark.

You must submit a written version of your presentation on the same day you give your seminar. It should contain a works cited list, conform to MLA style (8th edition), and be copy-edited.

2. Long paper (4000 words) Due Friday, 7 April, your long paper must be extensively researched, cogently structured and compelling in its originality. You need to construct a research question to address in your major essay, and

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confirm it with me before 1 March. The topic you wish to pursue is open, providing it addresses one or more of our primary texts and is in keeping with the thematic interests of the course.

3. Collaborative projectAcademic work in the Humanities is increasingly undertaken collaboratively. This exercise involves working with your fellow students to jointly construct a presentation of a minimum of 30 minutes in length for the last day on which our class meets. The presentation should reflect on the key findings of the course, and point to possible future directions for the study of Petrofiction, and/or research in Energy Humanities more broadly. The exact form and structure of this presentation is up to your group – feel free to be creative. Please keep, and then submit, a log of your individual efforts and time spent on the project; it is important that the work is shared evenly among group members. Please also submit a jointly authored write-up of your presentation on the last day of classes.

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Schedule

11 January Introduction to the course

18 January Petroleum and literature

Reading: Italo Calvino, “The Petrol Pump” Amitav Ghosh, “Petrofiction”Stephanie LeMenager, “Introduction,” Living OilGraeme MacDonald, “Fiction,” in Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and EnvironmentJennifer Wenzel, “Introduction.” Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and EnvironmentPatricia Yaeger et al, “Editor’s Column”

25 January Oil!

1 February Cities of Salt

8 February The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil

15 February Oil on Water

22 February Winter semester break

1 March Expressway

Additional Reading: Featherstone and Sheller essays (and anything else you have time to read) in the Theory Culture Society volume on Automobilities.

Deadline for confirming long essay topic

8 March Blood

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15 March After Oil?

Reading:Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History”Amitav Ghosh, The Great DerangementChina Mieville, “Covehithe”Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil

22 March Flight Behavior

29 March The Collapse of Western Civilization

5 April Conclusions:Group presentation

7 April Major paper due

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Some Suggestions for Further Reading (and Listening) in Energy and Environmental Humanities Research

Books

Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts, editors. Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Cornell UP, 2015.

Barrett, Ross and Daniel Worden, editors. Oil Culture. U of Minnesota P, 2014.

Davis, Heather and Etienne Turpin. Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies. Anexact, 2015.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making King in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016.

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.

Huber, Matthew. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. U of Minnesota P, 2013.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. U of Chicago P, 2016.

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon and Schuster, 2014.

LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford UP, 2014.

Lippard, Lucy, Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics and Art in the Changing West. New Press, 2014.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, 2016.

McNeish, John Andrew and Owen Logan, Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-Economics of Oil and Gas. Pluto, 2012.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso, 2011.

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Moore, Jason. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. U of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Petrocultures Research Group. After Oil. West Virginia UP, 2016.

Scranton, Roy. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. City Lights, 2015.

Stoekl, Allan. Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability. U of Minnesota P, 2007.

Szeman, Imre, and Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger, editors. Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment. Fordham UP, 2017.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015.

Yergin, Daniel. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Free Press, 1991.

Special Issues of Journals

American Book Review, vol. 33, no. 3, 2012. “Petrofictions.”

Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 2012. “Sighting Oil.”

Journal of American History, vol. 99, 2012. “Oil in American History.”

Journal of American Studies, vol. 46, 2012. “Special Issue on Oil Cultures.”

Reviews in Cultural Theory, vol. 6, no. 3, 2016. “Energy Humanities.”

Theory Culture and Society, vol. 21, no. 4-5, 2004.

Additional Articles

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Boyer, Dominic, and Imre Szeman. “The Rise of Energy Humanities.” University Affairs, 12 February, 2014.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009.

Ghosh, Amitav. “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel.” The New Republic, 2 March 1992.

Howe, Cymene, et al. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology and Human Values, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016.

Jones, C.F. “Petromyopia: Oil and the Energy Humanities.” Humanities, vol. 5, no. 2, 2016.

Macdonald, Graeme. “Research Note: The Resources of Fiction.” Reviews in Cultural Theory, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013.

---. “Improbability Drives: The Energy of Science Fiction.” Paradoxa, vol. 26, 2014.

Stewart, Janet. “Making Globalization Visible? The Oil Assemblage, the Work of Sociology and the Work of Art.” Cultural Sociology, vol. 7, no. 3, 2013.

Szeman, Imre. “How to Know about Oil: Energy epistemologies and Political Futures.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2013.

---. “System Failure: Oil, Futurity and the Anticipation of Disaster.” South Atlantic Quarterly vol. 106, no. 4, 2007.

Walonen, Michael. “’the Black and Cruel Demon’ and its Transformations of Space: Toward a Comparative Study of the World Literature of Oil and Place.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2012.

Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature.” Postcolonial Studies vol. 9, no. 4, 2006.

Yaeger, Patricia, et al. “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources.” PMLA vol. 126, no. 2, 2011.

Podcasts

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The Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University in Texas runs a fabulous podcast series that you can find links to here: http://culturesofenergy.com/

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