Online
Section Information for Fall 2020
What are the stories that we tell about oil? This course investigates the many ways in which we narrate the complex relationship between this essential, yet mostly invisible, commodity and our daily experiences and expectations. We will approach oil and culture by looking at it from two perspectives: the first, of oil in America – its role in our utopian images of the “road,” the entrepeneur, as well as our most dystopian conspiracy theories – through novels such as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and films like Giant, Syriana, and There Will Be Blood; the second will be of oil in the world as it appears in classics of world literature such as Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and accounts of oil in the world such as the documentary Crude. We will also consider the cultural representations of life beyond oil and the kinds of stories we might be telling in the future. In addition to the class readings and discussion we will be working on a collaborative research project on the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Using the class wiki, we will be compiling relevant material on the spill and its cultural effects. This material will be used as part of the students’ individual research projects that they will present at the end of the semester thus bringing the historical, critical, and aesthetic perspectives from the class readings to bear on our contemporary moment.
ENGH 202 DL1 is a distance education section.
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Credits: 3
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