Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

ISBN-13: 9780199899425 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 288 str.

Stephanie LeMenager

Opis

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 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. 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.

Recenzje

As this intriguing book makes clear, from Texas to Alberta we're an oil-soaked continent. That oil has gotten into our brains and done much to make us who we are-it's very useful to recognize that, so we can maybe do something about getting beyond it.

O autorze

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).