Session: 4b
Day: Thursday 16 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.16
Chair: Reinhard Hennig
Panel description: This panel session examines literary representations of subsurface matter—oil, precious minerals, but also other subterranean resources, such as water, and archaeological remains—and investigates how these texts engage with dominant extractivist discourses. Drawing upon Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel’s conceptualization of extractivism as “a human instrumentalisation of nonhuman nature” (Szeman/Wenzel 2021), we explore both formal and thematic dimensions of literary works and literary practice that either challenge or reinforce extractivist ideologies. The panel will address two central questions: To what extent do these literary texts disrupt political and economic instrumentalizations of the earth, or instead consolidate an extractivist perspective on subsurface matter? Secondly, how can human-authored narratives and readings subvert petrocapitalist approaches to and engagement with nonhuman nature, fostering solidarity with nonhuman entities across space and time—particularly underground materials that constitute the material foundation of the very extractivist perspectives and practices these narratives seek to critique? Panelists will engage with these questions through close readings of literary texts from different linguistic and geographic contexts, including Scandinavian, Central European and African literary contexts. We are particularly interested in how literary scholarship might offer alternative ways of understanding our relationship with the earth—moving beyond extractivist logics toward more collaborative forms of human-nonhuman engagement.
Anna Seidel (University of Vienna), “Narratives of Disintegration, Catalysts of Solidarity: Galician Oil Texts as Agents of Non/Human Kinship”
Abstract: Oil “reeks, it stinks, it becomes a Problem” writes Amitav Ghosh when coining the term petrofiction in 1992. To him, the problematic status of oil as well as a lack of suitable literary forms for narrativizing the Oil Encounter accounts for the scarcity of oil fiction. This claim cannot be substantiated in the Central European context. Literary texts about the oil fields in Galicia—which represented the European center of petroleum extraction and production in the 19th and early 20th centuries—demonstrate how the problematic nature of oil can in fact be negotiated in literary form. In most of these narratives, an overarching narrative pattern emerges in which these texts stage the Oil Encounter as original sin: human intervention in nonhuman nature initiates a vicious cycle of disintegration in non/human relations, where the degeneration of nonhuman nature correlates directly with the moral-social decay of humans. Oil ‘stinks’ in all these narratives from the very beginning, but becomes truly problematic only after humans commodify it as raw material. Through this intervention, humans destroy the harmony between non/human natures; at the same time, the protagonists’ social and moral downfall is staged as revenge by exploited nonhuman nature, disrupting the economic success stories the texts narrate on the level of plot.
Drawing on theories of intra-active relations between nonhuman matter and human practice (Haraway, Barad, Bennett), I analyze selected texts from the Galician petrofiction corpus (Hermann Blumenthal’s Der Weg zum Reichtum, 1913; Ivan Franko’s Boa Constrictor, 1884; Ignacy ‘Sewer’ Maciejowski’s Nafta, 1893) to demonstrate how this narrative pattern illustrates the loss of non/human kinship while simultaneously producing integrative effects at the level of narrative practice. Their critical positioning toward extractive exploitation can thus be understood as ‘caretaking activity’ (Freeman 2007), whereby these early oil narratives become agents against the very disintegration they depict, functioning as catalysts for human and nonhuman solidarity.
Bio: Anna Seidel is assistant professor of West Slavic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Vienna, where her research focuses on energy humanities, ecocriticism, urban literature, and gender studies. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Humboldt University Berlin and is the author of The City in a State of Exception (transcript, 2025). She is currently working on her second book, which examines 19th and early 20th-century petrofiction from Central Europe.
Frederike Felcht (Goethe University Frankfurt), “Multispecies Relationships, Subsurface Extraction, and the End of the World: Agnar Lirhus‘s and Rune Markhus’s Norwegian Picture Book Hva var det hun sa? (2014)”
Abstract: Hva var det hun sa? is a picture book based on Inger Christensen’s unsurpassable long poem alfabet that developed a strategy of preserving life in poetry when facing the threat of planetary destruction. Combining impressive pictures and a rewriting of Christensen’s text by including new species and extractivist practices, Hva var det hun sa? develops an additional layer that explores the roles of the submarine/subterranean for planetary life and its destruction.
In my talk, I will analyse some examples of the representation of the submarine/subterranean and their relationship to extractivism and multispecies conviviality. I will furthermore reflect on rewriting and illustrating as conservation practices of resistance in times of environmental crises.
Bio: Frederike Felcht is a professor of Modern Scandinavian Literature and Culture and the managing director of the Institute for Scandinavian Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her main research areas are modern Nordic literature, environmental humanities, and hunger and poverty in Nordic literature. Her current research focuses on literature and biodiversity.
Sophie U. Kriegel (Free University Berlin), “The Dis/Connective Power of Oil in West African Petrofiction”
Abstract: The proposed paper takes the perspective of the long durée to explore how West African literary representations of mobility, kinship, and oil extraction converge on different scales to form non/human ecologies of community. The topic is approached through a combination of postcolonial literary studies, ecocriticism, and energy humanities. The novels How Beautiful We Were (2021), by Cameroon-American author Imbolo Mbue, and Oil on Water (2010), by Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, explicitly challenge extractivist capitalism while implicitly consolidating aspects of dominant extractivist discourses that legitimise the instrumentalization of non-human nature (Szeman, Wenzel), such as river deltas and forests in West Africa. A comparative close reading of the petrofiction novels (Ghosh) uncovers that they are thematically and formally structured by (disrupted) circularities, which originate from the forceful extraction of oil from the ground.
The circularities are tied together through subtle question of non/human agency and conviviality ranging from the individual, local scale to a collective, transatlantic scale and across different temporalities to create transgenerational narratives of slow violence (Nixon). Thematically, the spatial and temporal dimensions are connected to disruptions of natural cycles that repeatedly cross the threshold between the surface and subsurface. The novels’ circular constructions flow around oil as its omnipresence creates cultural continuities (LeMenager) and ruptures. Three nodes are explored to trace the dis/connective potential of oil as an aesthetic strategy. Firstly, the potential to imagine community beyond the humannature binary. Secondly, the metaphor of darkness that intertwines the blackness of oil with the colonial discourse of progress, transatlantic slavery, and environmental destruction. Thirdly, representations of automobility that epitomise the paradox nature of oil as it constitutes global inequalities while enabling greater mobility for some. Mbue and Habila’s novels are attempts by authors to decentre the human thus an analysis of their works can help to move beyond extractivist logics.
Bio: Sophie U. Kriegel is a visiting lecturer at different departments of English Studies in Germany. She has taught a variety of classes on anglophone and South African culture, media, and the history of the British Empire and has published on mobility in South African fiction. Other research interests include petromasculinity, gendered spaces, and postcolonial mobilities.
Katie Ritson (LMU Munich), “Literature and Energy Precarity: Texts We Can Warm Ourselves By”
Abstract: My paper will explore the challenge of literary criticism against the status quo of extractivism and the threat of energy precarity.
While fossil fuel extraction and dependence continues to rise, and the threat of energy loss drives calls for a transition, there is a need to question the petromodern literary system that is imbricated with the ever increasing need for fuel. Szeman refers to what he calls the “fiction of surplus,” stating that “instead of challenging the fiction of surplus – as we might have hoped or expected – literature participates in it just as surely as every other social narrative in the contemporary era. Ever more narrative, ever more signification, ever more grasping after social meaning: what literature shares with the Enlightenment and capitalism is the implicit longing for the plus beyond what is.” (Szeman 2017).
Literary criticism itself apes many of the features of extraction – mining both surface and subsurface (text and subtext) to produce ever more meaning: newer techniques such as distance reading and digital humanities are predicated on the idea on a large and growing corpus of readable material. How can literature, and literary criticism, conceive of a turn away from the model of surplus?
I will explore this question through a reading of Jimmen (2011) by the Norwegian author Øyvind Rimbereid. Rimbereid’s long poem depicts the Norwegian city of Stavanger at a moment of energy transition, at the beginning of Norway’s age of oil. While the oil industry draws on subsurface reserves of decayed matter, Jimmen’s narrators are concerned with the processes by which matter becomes reabsorbed into the system, with decomposition and decay, thus modelling an alternative to the fiction of surplus, and directing critics towards a different kind of reading.
Bio: Katie Ritson is assistant professor in the Institute for Scandinavian Studies and affiliated researcher at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society at LMU Munich. She has written extensively on the North Sea in northern European literature, and more recently on oil and literature in Norway and Great Britain. Katie is a coordinator of the ENSCAN network for Ecocriticism in Scandinavian Studies.