Englisches Seminar, Grosser Hörsaal
Oil’s Returning Monsters – Petrofiction, Petroculture, Energy Humanities
Despite unprecedented acknowledgement of the deleterious effects and outcomes of ongoing carbonization, we remain beholden to a fossil-fuel regime. Industry preaches the necessity of maintaining global supply and opening new extractive frontiers; a position mediated through “realist” protocols. The emergence of petroculture as a critical field and artistic practice has offered a counter-perspective. It insists on viewing oil/energy as social, and therefore very much matter for world-literature and culture. This has partly involved mobilizing the “offshore” as metaphor for general energy unconscious, a claim extrapolated in the evolving rubrics of the wider field of Energy Humanities. Using a range of literary and visual examples from the North Sea and beyond, the talk explores how, in climate anxious times, petrofiction offers alternative visions to industry-sponsored projections of “oil realism”, exposing its somewhat paradoxical associations with apocalyptic, “irreal”, and speculative cultural and economic forms. Underpinning the paper is the question of how cultural criticism can confront what has been called “energopower”: ongoing “monstrous” forms of extractivism embedded in the world political economy, material infrastructures and affective lifeworlds of the carbon-driven world-system in a time of climate breakdown.
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