“Monstrous transformer”: Petrofiction and world literature

Abstract

This article presents a comparative study of two significant novels of oil-encounter modernization, George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe (1972) and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), in order to argue that such petrofiction both demands and enables consideration of the world-ecological regimes and environmental ramifications of dynamic oil frontiers. These hitherto unconnected novels are brought together via recent arguments for a refurbished notion of world literature, and thereby a new comparative method, and are read through critical debates and theories of petroculture emerging within the energy humanities. The comparative affinities of these texts make visible the ongoing forms of “energopower” determining both the past and future of oil-driven imperialism, but they also offer a means of aesthetic and environmental resistance to the carbonizing determinations of an unsustainable fuel-ecological world-system.

Keywords:

• Greenvoe
• Cities of Salt
• energy humanities
• world literature
• comparative literary studies
• petrofiction
• oil frontiers
• oil-encounter novels