Courses / Module

Oil “is at once everywhere and nowhere, indispensable yet largely unapprehended, not so much invisible as unseen” (2017, 11), writes Columbia University scholar and sometime Texan, Jennifer Wenzel, echoing and elaborating a problem first posed by Indian novelist, Amitav Ghosh (29) when he asked in his 1992 essay, “Petrofiction”, why the global oil industry, having produced such profound twentieth-century political, economic and sociocultural shifts, had not been addressed within the century’s hegemonic literary form, the novel. This module begins with the premise that the fossil-fuelled climate crisis is in part a crisis of representation and that the challenge of moving to a post-oil economy involves not only visibilising oil in literature and culture but apprehending the limits to our capacity to see or understand “what ‘it’ is doing at any given place at any given time” (Szeman, 2019, 7). We will explore oil representation in a range of contexts from Kuwait to Canada to the Niger Delta to Ireland and across a range of media, including poetry, life narrative, short stories, petrocultural theory, documentary film and television drama. The module will involve a visit to the Maynooth Library archives where students will view the death-row correspondence of writer and environmentalist, Ken Saro-Wiwa to Irish solidarity worker, Sr. Majella McCarren. Students taking this module will need access to a streaming service, such as Netflix, to screen the award-winning Danish political drama, Borgen: Power and Glory.