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The article explores petroculture in the poetry of Eileen Myles. Topics include the association between driving and aliveness according to Stephanie LeMenager's "Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century," novelist Amitav Ghosh's thoughts about the absence of oil in novels, and an examination of Myles' 2012 book "Snowflake/Different Streets and in particular the section called the "LA/Driving Poems" that constantly figure driving as a mode of relation.

Since the beginning, fuel resources have been imperative to sustain life on earth. The benchmark of civilisation is noted by the evolution in the usage of fuel resources over a period of time. Transformation from wood, tallow, coal, whale oil to fossil fuels saw the advent of modern industrialised society. The oil resources have played a significant role in designing the economic and historical construct of contemporary times. Petrofiction is the representation of the petroculture in literature. The greed for power and capital has modified oil from being an energy resource to a weapon for social, political and economic domination. The discovery of oil in Iran transformed the prospects of the country, and it became the battlefield of hegemony and politics. This paper aims to critically view Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, as a petrofiction by analysing the historical setting and how oil propels the main action of the story. The consequences of the oil war, and how both the internal and external cues like trauma and war affect the behavioural pattern of the children, are studied using this graphic novel. Thus, the paper signifies the magnitude of the oil narratives, and their importance in the current anthropocene epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a literary criticism of American author John Dos Passos' trilogy "U.S.A." which includes the books "The 42nd Parallel," "1919" and "The Big Money." It discusses the history of the petroleum industry in the U.S. and analyzes the role that petroleum plays in the trilogy, as well as mentioning the themes of modernity and the growth of the state. Other topics include World War I fiction and how the war changed the relationship between the U.S. state and the oil industry.

With respect to the notions of utopia and dystopia, the present article tries to approach hermeneutically two main axis: on the one hand, the new epistemological altermodern visions; on the other, the Venezuelan literary oil imaginary as a faustian and/or promethean argument of modernity. Thus, in the first part we will develop an epistemological proposal which is flexible, open and with a tendency towards a utopian view, based on Beuchot's analogical hermeneutics. This reflection will serve as the epistemic basis in the interpretative task undertaken in the second part. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An attempt to illustrate how the environment has a far-reaching, marked impact on literature in respect of Chimeka Garricks's Tomorrow Died Yesterday (2010) entails an eclectic, cross-disciplinary preoccupation. It is an initiative that considers why Niger Delta's youths have to contend with not only enduring economic disenfranchisement but also environmental degradation emanating from regular oil spillages in the region. Often in a particular ecocritical literary work, a writer has to present a balanced view. For Garricks, artistic, political, economic and environmental concerns raised in the novel are inextricably interwoven with Niger Delta's youth restiveness. The article reassesses how this novel portrays the interaction between environmental degradation and youth marginalisation in the oil-bearing Delta region in contemporary Nigeria. It further examines the way Garricks explores the theme of environmental devaluation of his Niger Delta society as it impinges on the youth restiveness in Tomorrow Died Yesterday. The paper interrogates the power of imagination in its appropriation of word, imagery and symbolism to represent the debilitating problematic of environmental concerns in the oil-bearing region of Nigeria. Ecocriticism is utilised as the theoretical framework to argue that socioecological issues of the Niger Delta constitute the major focus of the novel as they underpin the economic emasculation of youths from the region, underlined in the lives of the characters portrayed in the novel. The paper concludes that the radical transformation of the Niger Delta from a peaceful littoral haven into the ransomtaking enclave of the present is grounded in Garricks's creative depiction of the youths' debilitating economic marginality, derived from the perilous environmental degradation of that region in the past decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the discovery of oil, the Gulf states have become the most sought after destinations, especially for job seekers from South Asia which, in turn, has resulted in a rapidly growing population in the Gulf states mainly due to the large expatriate work force [Kapiszewski, A. 2006. “Arab versus Asian Migrant Workers in the GCC Countries.” Accessed November 5, 2012.http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/EGM_Ittmig_Arab/P02_Kapiszewski.pdf]. Proceeding from Amitav Ghosh's pioneering essay, ‘Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel’, where Ghosh maintains that despite its dramatic nature any literary engagement with the oil encounter and its main protagonists has remained ‘imaginatively sterile’, this paper examines the literary representation of Indian labour migrants in Dubai. With a particular focus on Shamlal Puri's novelDubai Dreams: The Rough Road to Riches(2010), which centres around the lives of a group of Indian taxi drivers in Dubai and Ali F. Mostafa's filmCity of Life, it explores the forms and conventions of literary and filmic responses to petro-migrants within an urban context. As such, the novel and the film provide alternative narratives to the ‘muteness of the Oil Encounter’, as identified by Ghosh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the aesthetics of petroleum in literature and film. Particular focus is given to the book "Oil!" by Upton Sinclair and the film "There Will Be Blood" directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, which is an adaptation of Sinclair's novel. According to the author, most literature and media which are critical of oil and oil culture nevertheless cannot seem to imagine a world beyond this culture. Topics discussed include automobiles and the association of oil with bodily properties.