Living Oil

Petroleum Culture in the American Century
Erscheinungsjahr 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-989942-5
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 5, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 570 g

Reihe: Oxford Studies in American Literary History

Living Oil is a work of environmental cultural studies that engages with a wide spectrum of cultural forms, from museum exhibits and oil industry tours to poetry, documentary film, fiction, still photography, novels and memoirs. The book's unique focus is the aesthetic, sensory and emotional legacies of petroleum, from its rise to the preeminent modern fossil fuel during World War I through the current era of so-called Tough Oil. LeMenager conceives Tough
Oil as a bid for continuity with the charismatic lifestyles of the American twentieth century that carries distinct and extreme external costs. She explores the uncomfortable, mixed feelings produced by oil's omnipresence in cultural artifacts such as books, films, hamburgers, and Aspirin tablets. The book
makes a strong argument for the region as a vital intellectual frame for the study of fossil fuels, because at the regional level we can better recognize the material effects of petroleum on the day-to-day lives of humans and other, non-human lives. Varied forms of art, too, localize the material impacts of petro-culture. The fluid mobility of oil carries the book outside the United States, for instance to Alberta and Nigeria, emphasizing how both international and domestic resource regions
have been mined to produce the idealized modern cultures of the so-called American Century.

Autoren/Hrsg.

LeMenager, Stephanie

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik
• Geisteswissenschaften Theater- und Filmwissenschaft | Andere Darstellende Künste Filmwissenschaft, Fernsehen, Radio Filmgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Prologue
Introduction - Ultradeep, Petroleum Culture in the American Century
Chapter 1 - Origins, Spills
Chapter 2 - The Aesthetics of Petroleum
Chapter 3 - Petromelancholia
Chapter 4 - The Petroleum Archive
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Stephanie LeMenager is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara and she is the author of Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of Nebraska Press, 2005).