Academic literature on the topic 'Petro-fiction'

This article traces the rise of modern oil culture to interlocking innovations in British fiction, political economy, natural science, and colonial capitalism. It advances a method called “transitive reading” to understand those innovations and to show how writers first conceived of oil in relation to established energy inputs such as coal. The article then reads Joseph Conrad's late masterpiece, Victory (1915), as an ambivalent artifact of the British petro-imagination. In representing the “liquidation” of overseas coal capitalism, Victory articulates a desire for freedom from carbon power, while nevertheless binding that desire to a world where petroleum or “liquid coal” was becoming increasingly constitutive of the self.

The article deals with the main trends of modern biblical studies of ancient literature, in particular the Ukrainian Polish-language prose of the Baroque period. Attention is focused on the universal and individual factors of sacral images and motifs interpretation derived from the Scriptures and designed on the background of fiction. Accordingly, the polycultural character of Polish-language works created on the borders of Ukrainian and Polish literatures is underlined. The author analyzes the creative work of baroque writers such as Meletii Smotryckyi, Ipatii Potii, Andrii Muzhylovskyi, Lazar Baranovych, Petro Mohyla, Ioanykii Galiatovskyi, Teofil Rutka, Pahomii Woina Oranskyi, etc. In the context of their bible interpretation a special place is dedicated to the quotation of the Holy Scriptures, as well as concord series of biblical images for which numerous references have been given, biblical paraphrases and repositions of evangelical parables, liturgical symbols, and metaphorical constructions derived from the Bible mentioned by ancient authors as works possessing individual and typological characteristics.

The early twentieth-century oil boom radically transformed the Osage reservation in Oklahoma, and in the early 1920s the Osages became the world's richest community because of their collective sharing of profits from mineral resources. In 1934, John Joseph Mathews, an Osage American tribal historian, publishedSundown, his only work of fiction, a peculiarBildungsromanabout the life of Chal Windzer in the aftermath of oil discovery on the Osage reservation. I argue that Mathews's use of the novel of formation is a particularly important literary and intellectual intervention. First, at a time when the significance of material resources to the American economy and American national imaginary was growing, Mathews uses the generic convention of progress to narrate oil's social “formation,” alongside the tale of Chal's dissolution, his failure, that is, of the very development which the novel's genre implies. Second, Mathews's literary representation of the oil boom as the Great Frenzy – a period of widespread violence and cultural chaos – complicates traditional accounts of capitalist economic development, which define late-stage capitalism and its financial deregulation and IT boom as an era of radical cultural “fluidity” (Bauman, Sennett). By drawing attention to the material and social fluidity of oil culture and the force with which it affected the Osages,Sundownpoints to a specific Osage American colonial, and thus always already transnational, history of (petro)modernity. The character of modernity, Mathews shows us, is inextricably tied to the conditions under which human and natural resources are extracted and allowed to become “social.” The destabilization of reservation culture derives equally from oil discovery itself, and the technological transformations within the energy industry, from the colonialist conditions that impose capitalism upon the Osages, and from the very collectivist modes of wealth distribution that the Osages adopted in order to resist colonial exploitation. Thus Mathews's novel reveals an alternative genealogy of the destabilization of cultural forms to the one that begins with post-Bretton Woods global financial deregulation, the collapse of state institutions in the global North, and the late twentieth-century emergence of new communication technologies. For the Osages in the 1920s and for the characters inSundown, crude oil and colonial exploitation, as well as, paradoxically, anticapitalist legal provisions of the Allotment Act's collectivizing of it, make reservation culture “liquid” and “uncertain” precisely at the time of America's entering into the presumably “solid” econo-political phase of development.

This study aims to shed light on the problematics of handling modernization and modernity as synonymous. This conflation overlooks the importance of the transitional processes that pave the way for modernity to take place.The paper examines two Petro-fiction works: Wallace Stegner’s Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oiland Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt,’al-Tih, which when studied contrapuntally, provide examples of the dichotomy between modernity and modernization. Furthermore, putting these two texts together opens up processes that are otherwise invisible. To show that, the paper uses Jacques Derrida’ssous rature as a lens to expose the lies and exploitation behind the Westerngrand narratives of modernization and imperial benevolence. While Stegner crosses out and covers under the surface of his content the exasperating and disrupting components of his narrative, Munif unearths and reveals the truth behind them.The study draws upon various theoretical frameworks, such as Richard Peet, Rob Nixon,Robert Vitalis, and Irene L. Gendzier.

In the television series Sex and the City, there is a scene which illustrates a familiar contempt for suburban life as dull and boring. Implicit is the oppositional view that urban life by comparison, is the more exciting one. Charlotte (one of four women whose sexual and romantic relationships are the focus of the series), has spent time with her in-laws in an upper middle class suburban enclave, and is confessing to her three girl friends her fantasies and ultimate sexual encounter with her in-law's hunk of a gardener. She's racked with guilt over the incident, not least because she is married to the sexually non-performing Trey. At this point in the conversation, Samantha, whose voracious appetite for men is her hallmark, dismisses Charlotte's concerns with the retort: 'well honey really, what's the point of living in the suburbs if you can't fuck the gardener?' Ergo, a life of suburban mediocrity deserves some kind of compensation, preferably an exciting sexual antidote. Samantha's remark draws on a wealth of discourses which reinforce the opposition between the city and the suburbs, and the city and the country, where the city is the crucible for adventure, opportunity and sometimes danger. For these New York women, it is precisely excitement and the possibility of sex and romance that holds them to the metropolis. The association of sexual opportunity for women and the metropolis is something of a departure from earlier narratives of the city. Gender and sexual identity - through discourse, narrative, image and metaphor are inscribed in spatial landscapes, with a rich source to be found in articulations of the city. Inscriptions are contingent on social, economic and cultural forces which shift over time and place, often defining and redefining utopian and dystopian visions. The rise of the great nineteenth century European cities, for instance provoked both utopian and dystopian discourse. Industrialization, overcrowding and poverty were issues which provided representations of the city as menacing and deleterious (as represented in the writing of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe), while the practice of the flaneur--a nineteenth century male who observed and chronicled the new cities of nineteenth century Europe--confirmed the metropolis as a storehouse of aesthetic and experiential delights. The contemporary zeitgeist is largely utopian, the postmodern city is desirable, uber-cool: sexy. Look at any advertising for inner city apartment living to confirm this. The city's erotic potential is characterized by one of the fundamental conditions of urban life: the close proximity in which we all live among strangers (see also Patton 1995). On a psychic, if not material level, this might provide opportunity for reinvention and renewal of self, for an individual freedom and expression denied to those living in smaller and closer communities. This is the attraction and romanticism of the city. The proximity of strangers gives urban life its erotic possibilities, the capacity for anonymity, that chance meetings with strangers, who we so often live and work among. Lawrence Knopp (1995) describes this aspect of city life as: a world of strangers, a particular life space with a logic and sexuality of its own. The city's sexuality is described as an eroticisation of many of the characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility, motion danger, power, navigation and restlessness. (151) I've been collecting metaphors of the city and these reveal the congruence between eros and the city. I have yet to find one that is masculine. For instance, journalist Harold Nicholson summing up three European cities used woman as metaphor: 'London is an old lady - Paris is a woman - But Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face' (Petro 1989, 21). Jean Baudrillard's description of Las Vegas as 'that great whore' is similarly feminized and sexualized, and metropolises like New York where aggressive advertisements are like 'wall to wall prostitution.' For Baudrillard, in New York, the plumes of smoke are reminiscent of 'girls wringing out their hair after bathing' (in Docker 1995, 106). Author and journalist John Birmingham described Sydney as 'a tart, loud and brash'. I should add to the list a straw poll of metaphors I conducted for Brisbane, my favourite being Brisbane as a 'middle aged woman in resort wear' (thanks to Maureen Burns for this contribution). But maybe, with the focus on urban development, she might be getting younger. For a (heterosexual) man the city can be alluring, dangerous and feminine. Eros, the city, femininity and danger all collide in the film noir genre, in films such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Lawrence Kasden's Body Heat, where beautiful femme fatales lead men astray, or further down the path of corruption. Woman as stranger is alluring and seductive for men, but for woman the chance encounter with a male stranger might signal caution and fear. For women, the dangers are clear: the threat of sexual danger, the chance encounter with a male whose intentions may not be benign. `Reclaim the Night' marches are testament to women's concerns about safety and access to public space, particularly at night. Although research shows that the overwhelming majority of assaults upon women occur in the home, by a person known to the woman, this sober fact does not prevent the cautionary strategies most women employ while out at night. Nor does it diminish the fear and limitations which are the reality of women's experience in public space, particularly at night. Historically, women's role in the public space of the city has been an ambivalent one. A number of analyses of women's role in the nineteenth century city identify the ways in which women in public space were managed and regulated by social and economic interests. Courted on the one hand as consumers for the new department stores and a burgeoning capitalist economy, women were also subject to strict codes of conduct, lest their virtue be in question. Judith Walkowitz in The City of Dreadful Delights examined the ways in which public discourse of danger in nineteenth century London, including the account of Jack the Ripper, as malevolent male stranger, function as a form of moral regulation for women in these newly created city spaces. Both Walkowitz and cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson argue that the metropolis of the nineteenth century, eroded the boundaries between private and public spheres and divisions of labour between men and women. A disquiet and concern over women entering these new public spaces manifested in a discourse of danger and morality, underpinned by the idea that women were at the mercy of their passions and required control and guidance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Freud had something to say about this. He speculated that the condition of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, (which for Freud was an intrinsically female neurosis), was linked to a repressed inner desire to walk the streets, to be streetwalkers (Vidler 1993, 35). But times have changed: the contemporary postmodern city, is celebrated, promoted and regulated as one of diversity, inclusivity and liveablity. Access and amenity are the buzzwords of local and state government policy. In the postmodern city everyone ostensibly is made welcome and a plethora of infrastructure support different interests and lifestyles. Cafés culture has provided a social space for women in particular, previously denied wholesale access to that other Australian social space, the pub. Women's earning capacity means that many of their interests are represented culturally and socially and that they are more firmly inserted into the fabric of city life. Television series and sit-coms located in the city, where groups of friends sometimes live together; Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City reinforce the perception of city living as a place of opportunity and fun for younger women and men. Promotional literature is quick to exploit this image. A tourism brochure for the inner city Sydney (non!) suburb of Newtown, describes the attractions of the area: `some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney's blessed with Newtown, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood.' As if Cabramatta, Fairfield or Parramatta, all outer suburban areas of Sydney, weren't cosmopolitan. A billboard in Brisbane's urban renewal area of Newstead, advertises apartment living as 'Urban living NOT suburban'. Drawing upon the rhetoric of opposition and expressing the familiar anti-suburban sentiment which for Australia, originated in the bohemian movement of the late nineteenth century (see also Kinnane 1998). This tradition probably reached its apotheosis with Barry Humphries in the 1960s whose comedic alter ego, Edna Everage signified everything that was despicable and mindless about suburbia. Edna's obsession with housing décor, cooking and recipes, social status and the minutiae of domesticity was portrayed with a venomous satire that depended upon a trivialization of traditional feminine competencies. Is there a connection between the anti- suburban tradition of cultural elites and the suburbs' close association with the domestic and feminine sphere of life? Patrick White in describing the mythical suburb of Sarsaparilla claimed it as 'a geographical hell ruled by female demons' (in Duruz 1994). American historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal work The City in History wrote that the suburbs are not 'merely a child centred environment: it is based on a childish view of the world which is sacrificed to the pleasure principle' (1961). Little wonder that today, younger women are fleeing the suburbs and flocking to the city, attracted by its possibility of adventure and eros. The other day I picked up my teenage daughter from her school to which she had returned after a five day camp in the bush. 'Aaaagh', she sighed with a sense of relief, as we approached our densely populated inner city suburb, 'buildings again… and not too many trees'. The following morning we were out in the lush and fecund Samford Valley, this time at her first soccer match for the season. As we drove further into the bush she yelled out, 'Oh no, not all these trees again!' Is this the response of a typical twenty- first century urban woman? References Docker, John. (1995) Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A cultural history. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Duruz, Jean. (1994) 'Romancing the Suburbs?' in Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson (eds) Metropolis Now. Sydney, Pluto Press. Kinnane, Gary. (1998) 'Shopping at Last!:History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition.' Australian Literary Studies: Writing the Everyday, Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, 18. 4: 41-55. Knopp, Lawrence. (1995) 'Sexuality and Urban Space: a framework for analysis' in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire. London, Routledge. Mumford, Lewis. (1961) The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. London, Penguin. Patton, Paul. (1995) 'Imaginary Cities' in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers. Petro, Patrice (1989) Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimer Germany. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Vidler, Anthony (1993) 'Bodies in Space/Subjects in the City: Psychopathologies of Modern Urbanism.' Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5.3: 31-51. Walkowitz, Judith. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late Victorian London. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Watson, Sophie and Gibson, Katherine. (1995) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder and Women. London: Virago. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Felton, Emma. "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php>. Chicago Style Felton, Emma, "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Felton, Emma. (2002) The City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]).

As a medium of modernity, film has always been entwined with the energy regime sustaining it. This thesis is interested in the interrelation between film and oil, and approached as a piece of petro-fiction, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear (1953) is subject to a close, ecocritical analysis. A selection of four additional oil-films are used as points of comparison. By looking at a variety of representational and aesthetic aspects, the study explores how the film visualises the Anthropocene and negotiates the oil culture in which it exists. By reading the film in terms of oil, this thesis finds that the film in various ways expresses an entanglement with oil culture, while also criticising the same dependency. From the five oil films that have been analysed, catastrophe is an inherent motif, and part of the attraction of oil as subject matter, mirrored in broader culture of exuberance. In contrast to the other films, The Wages of Fear plays less into spectacle but opens to a critical examination of the various exploitations involved at the hands of the oil industry.

This chapter examines texts about the Niger Delta in several genres (Ogaga Ifowodo’s poem The Oil Lamp; fiction by Uwem Akpan, Helon Habila, and Ben Okri; the photo-essay anthology Curse of the Black Gold; Sandy Cioffi’s film Sweet Crude). Juxtaposing political ecology’s analysis of natural resource conflicts with Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, the chapter argues that the relationships among petroleum extraction, literary production, and national imagining in Nigeria are better described as un-imagining, a corollary of underdevelopment as a transitive process of unmaking. Postcolonial citizenship entails a struggle over key questions: What is the state for? To whom do natural resources belong? Oil hijacks the imagination, promising wealth without work, progress without the passage of time. This dynamic manifests as petro-magic-realism, a literary variant of the resource curse hypothesis that blames the ills of resource extraction on the substance rather than social relations. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 galvanized world attention on the Nigerian petro-state; the subsequent explosion of violence in the Niger Delta can be read as a perverse realization of some of his demands for ethnic autonomy and resource control.