Literature and Oil

This course will investigate the connections between literary/cultural production and petroleum as the substance that makes possible the world as we know it, both as an energy source and a component in the manufacture of everything from food to plastic.  Our current awareness of oil’s scarcity and its myriad costs (whether environmental, political, or social) provides a lens to read for the presence (or absence) of oil in texts in a variety of genres and national traditions.  As we begin to imagine a world “beyond petroleum,” this course will confront ways in which oil shapes both the world we know and how we imagine the world.  Oil will feature in this course in questions of theme (texts about “oil”), of literary form (are there common formal conventions of an “oil novel”?), of interpretive method (how to read for oil), of transnational circulation (how does “foreign oil” link US citizens to other spaces?), and of the materiality (or “oiliness”) of literary culture (how does the production and circulation of texts, whether print or digital, rely on oil?).