Summary

In Impasse Poetics at the Nordic Oil Coast, Karl Emil Rosenbaek Reetz examines the viscosity of our current bitumen foundation through the representation of oil as more than mere energy in Danish and Norwegian literature and culture from 1992 to today. The 1990s mark the beginning of institutionalized, supranational recognition of climate change with the initiation of the Conference of the Parties (COP, 1995), the UN Earth Summit of 1992, and the Kyoto Agreement of 1997. The last thirty years have seen a huge public and political increase in awareness of climate change, perfectly aligned with a huge increase in the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

In the quest for a greener future, the Nordic countries proclaim to be green frontier nations, yet Denmark and especially Norway also continue to extract natural gas and oil from the seabed of the North Sea and further North. This, I argue in the book, has led to a peculiar sense of oil impasse present in contemporary fiction from this region. The Nordic green frontier myth, it seems, does not instil the intelligentsia with a sense of accomplishment as much as a sense of despair.

Contents

Chapter 1        Introduction: From Peak Oil Frenzy to Tough Oil Impasse

Part I: Oil and Water

Chapter 2        “Below, Everything Is Speculation”: Oceanic Irrealism

Chapter 3        Smilla and the Arctic Petroleumscape: Offshore Nordic Noir

Chapter 4        Roustabout Narratives: North Sea Oil Work and the Peripheralization of Worker Rights

Intermezzo      Oil Adventure Inc.: A Story of Concrete and Discursive Ingenuity

Part II: Stuck in a Moment

Chapter 5        Pedal off the Metal: Breaking the Habit of Careless Car Culture

Chapter 6        Future Energyscapes: Nordic After-Oil Imaginings

Conclusion: From Impasse to Dissonance

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Original Danish and Norwegian Poetry and Prose Selections from the Book

Notes

Author

Karl Emil Rosenbaek Reetz is the Carlsberg Internationalization Postdoc Fellow, Faculty of the Humanities, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in culture and language from the University of Copenhagen. He is a literary scholar specializing in the interrelations and cultural implications of energy sources, particularly oil. His primary area of interest concerns contemporary literary fiction from the Nordic countries and their intermixture with the heavily industrialized Norway. Rosenbaek Reetz has published in The Journal of Energy History; Women, Gender & Research; and Ecozon@. He has contributed to The Cambridge Companion to World Gothic Literature, The Sea in Nordic Literature, and the Handbook of Research on Sustainable Lifestyles.

Reviews

“An important—even necessary—contribution to a growing body of work on petroculture, from a region with a significant, yet understudied, greenhouse gas footprint. This culture of oil extraction in Norway is fascinatingly contradictory, even monstrous.”

—Karen Pinkus, Cornell University professor emerita and author of Subsurface and Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary