ABSTRACT

In the two decades between Amitav Ghosh’s petrofiction and Imre Szeman’s, the oil era became retrospectively more visible as a result of the growing public awareness of, and scientific consensus about, the link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. With the popular introduction of the concept of the Anthropocene in 2000, a new environmental awareness emerged. The awareness was that the petroleum is not an infinite energy resource, and that, even if it were, it could not continue to be burned at the current rate without causing the earth’s climate to change in ways we are not fully able to predict, and to which we may not even be able to adapt. Petrocriticism, then, is that branch of literary criticism specializing in petromodernity for which the concept of the “energy regime” is the most significant mode of historical and literary-historical periodizing; to paraphrase Patricia Yaeger, instead of the political unconscious, petrocriticism supposes the energy unconscious.