ABSTRACT

This article explores the conceptual habits that made it difficult for twentieth-century literary studies to take novels about oil extraction seriously. Focusing primarily on Ramón Díaz Sánchez’s Mene (1936) from Venezuela, and Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1983), published in Lebanon, but ostensibly about Saudi Arabia, I argue that oil extractive novels present an aesthetic and political challenge to the sensibilities and spatial imaginaries of high-energy societies. By exploring the overlooked connections among petronarratives, this essay ultimately posits that we should read texts like Mene and Cities of Salt as part of a global archipelago of texts depicting sites with shared histories of social and environmental harm, which have accumulated into our current planetary ecological crisis. Such a reading involves resisting the impulse to reduce extractive literature to a single context because reckoning with the narratives that sustained and resisted our fossil-fuelled ways of life requires being less concerned with situating a text in its proper place, and more with articulating relations among the particular and planetary phenomena.

摘要

本文探讨了使二十世纪文学研究难以认真对待有关采油小说的概念习惯。我主要关注委内瑞拉的拉蒙·迪亚斯·桑切斯的《梅内》（1936年）和黎巴嫩出版的阿卜杜拉赫曼·穆尼夫的《盐之城》（1983年），但表面上讲的是沙特阿拉伯，我认为石油采掘小说对敏感性和空间性提出了美学和政治挑战高能社会的假想。通过探索石油叙事学之间被忽视的联系，本文最终认为，我们应该阅读诸如《梅内》和《盐城》之类的文章。作为全球文字群岛的一部分，描述了具有共同的社会和环境危害历史的遗址，这些遗址已累积到我们当前的星球生态危机中。这样的阅读涉及抵制将提取性文学简化为单一背景的冲动，因为考虑到维持和抵制我们以化石为燃料的生活方式的叙事需要更少地关注将文本放置在适当的位置，而更多地关注表述之间的关系。特殊的行星现象。