Abstract
This chapter develops the material concept of the aesthetic textuality of oil. This phrase describes both oil’s impact on cultural production and the development of particularly oil-bound social formations and habits. The chapter proceeds from an opening description of the photography of Edward Burtynsky. It draws on the work of critic Stephanie LeMenager to define petrocriticism and petrocultre. It then offers an overview of literary and filmic approaches to making the world of oil apparent. Finally, this chapter turns to James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 travelogue The Oil Road, which maps the relation of oil to art and culture, meanwhile showcasing a method for elaborating the aesthetic textuality of oil as a materialist concept.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Works Cited
Ahlberg, Sofia. 2017. Goodbye Crude World: The Aesthetics of Environmental Catastrophe in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Edward Burtynsky’s Oil Photographs. The Comparatist 41: 78–92. https://doi.org/10.1353/com.2017.0005.
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden (eds.). 2014. Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bozak, Nadine. 2012. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1977. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2015. Paranoid Subjectivity. https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capitalism-to-be-represented/1080/9. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
The Carbon Web. n.d. Platform: Arts, Activism, Education, Research. http://platformlondon.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
Diamanti, Jeff. 2017. From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value: The Energy Unconscious of the Octopus. Western American Literature 54 (4): 391–407.
Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel. In Incendiary Circumstances, 131–151. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
———. 2016. The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hitchcock, Peter. 2010. Oil in an American Imaginary. New Formations 69: 81–97.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macalister, Terry. 2012. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello—Review. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/14/oil-road-james-marriott-mika-minio-paluello-review. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
Marriot, James, and Mika Minio-Paluello. 2013. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London. New York: Verso.
Massey, Doreen. 2013. Mapping the Carbon Web. Soundings 54: 127–130.
Munif, Abdelrahman.1989. Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux. New York: Vintage International.
McGrath, John. 2015. The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, ed. Graeme Macdonald. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Moore, Lisa. 2009. February. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Peeples, Jennifer. 2011. Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes. Environmental Communication 5 (4): 373–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2011.616516.
Rutkauskas, Andreas. 2011. Petrolia. https://www.andreasrutkauskas.com/petrolia. Accessed 8 May 2019.
Szeman, Imre. 2012. Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries. Journal of American Studies 46 (2): 423–439.
———. 2015. Art Against Oil: Offshore and Other Experiments in Eco-Representation. Point of View Magazine 97: 28–31.
Updike, John. 1988. Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns. The New Yorker, October 17, pp. 117–121.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2016. Improvement and Overburden. Postmodern Culture 26: 2. https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0003.
Westall, Claire. 2017. World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism. Journal of Post-Colonial Writing 53 (3): 265–276.
Whalan, Mark. 2017. “Oil Was Trumps”: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., World War I, and the Growth of the Petromodern State. American Literary History 29 (3): 474–498.
Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (eds.). 2017. Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Acknowledgements
This chapter grows out of research I conducted as a Social Sciences and Humanities postdoctoral research fellow at the Memorial University of Newfoundland under the supervision of Danine Farquharson. My thanks go to Danine, as well as to Fiona Polack, Jennifer Lokash, Andrew Loman, and Christopher Lockett. Special thanks are due to Neel Ahuja, a most gracious and insightful editor, and to Monique Allewaert, a thoughtful reader. Priscilla Wald deserves my thanks as well for inviting my contribution. Adam Carlson and I talked about the text as I was composing it, and it was on his suggestions that I read The Oil Road to begin with. I presented an early version of this work at the American Comparative Literature Association held in Seattle in 2015 in a seminar titled Infrastructure and Form organized by Joseph Jeon and Kate Marshall. They also have my thanks. Finally, I would like to thank the students of ENGL 487: Energy/Literature (Fall 2017) who read many of the texts mentioned here for their enthusiasm and insight about energy humanities.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bellamy, B.R. (2020). The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-48243-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-48244-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)