Honors Projects

Abstract

Despite oil’s heavy saturation within the context of contemporary global life, novelistic registrations of oil frontiers and extractive drilling in contemporary world literature remain proportionally barren with regards to oil’s political and geographical importance across the world-system. Petro-cultural production, transnational in scale and imposing in material basis, relegates oil to a paradoxical literary deferment. The general invisibility of petrofiction within the petro-sphere suggests that the materialist basis of petroleum and its fraught geopolitical history has culturally transformed oil into a repressed, peripheral, and hidden material that subsequently renders the oil-encounter unseen in contemporary literature. This creative synthesis of the oil-encounter in relation to petrofiction and original fiction-making seeks to push the experimental boundaries of petrofiction into other areas of theoretical and interdisciplinary discourse, namely those affiliated with the new materialisms and critical posthumanism in the form of the nonhuman.

Department

Creative Writing

Major

Creative Writing

Second Major

Art – BFA in Graphic Design

First Advisor

Dr. Reema Rajbanshi

First Advisor Department

Creative Writing

Second Advisor

Dr. Nathan Hensley

Second Advisor Department

Biological Sciences

Publication Date

Spring 4-20-2024

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