Impasse Poetics at the Nordic Oil Coast

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.

"An important- even necessary - contribution to a growing body of work on petroculture, from a region with a significant, yet understudied, greenhouse gass footprint. This culture of oil extraction is fascinatingly contradictory, even monstrous." — Karen Pinkus, Cornell University professor emerita and author of Subsurface and Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary

• Introduction: From Peak Oil Frenzy to Tough Oil Impasse Part I: Oil and WaterChapter 2 'Below, Everything is Speculation': Oceanic IrrealismChapter 3 Smilla and the Arctic Petroleumscape: Offshore Nordic NoirChapter 4 Roustabout Narratives: North Sea Oilwork and the Peripheralism of Worker Rights Intermezzo: Oil Adventure inc—A story of Concrete and Discursive Ingenuity Part II: Stuck in a MomentChapter 5 Pedal off the Metal: Breaking the Habit of Careless Car CultureChapter 6 Future Energyscapes: Nordic After-Oil Imaginings Conclusion: From Impasse to DominanceAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex