English and Comparative Literature
Undergraduate and Graduate Seminar
MW 4:10-5:25PM
This course will investigate the connections between literary/cultural production and petroleum as the substance that makes possible the world as we know it, both as an energy source and a component in the manufacture of everything from food to plastic. Our current awareness of oil’s scarcity and its myriad costs (whether environmental, political, or social) provides a lens to read for the presence (or absence) of oil in texts in a variety of genres and national traditions. As we begin to imagine a world “beyond petroleum,” this course will confront the ways in which oil shapes both the world we know and how we know and imagine the world. Oil will feature in this course in questions of theme, of literary form, of interpretive method, of transnational circulation, and of the materiality of literary culture.
Link to Vergil
Note: only courses offered during the two previous semesters have active Vergil links.
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