‘Sublime Oilscapes’: Literary Depictions of Landscapes Transformed by the Oil Industry

AbstractLiterary reactions to the transformation of landscape by modern technology foreground the fragility of the planet while at the same time suggesting notions of immensity and inspiring awe. Oil mining, in particular, threatens and destroys essential mega-biotopes, as for example two of the biggest wetlands on earth, the Athabasca Tar Sands in Canada’s northern Alberta and the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria. While we are flooded, daily, by media reports on environmental damage and by scientifically based scenarios of future catastrophes, it is literature with its specifically ambiguous and multidimensional make-up, which proves to be an ideal medium to foreground the ambivalence of twenty-first century societies regarding their attitude towards a radically modified natural environment. The double aesthetics of the sublime, in particular, proves to be a congenial creative (and critical) approach to these fear- and awe-inspiring landscapes, which have been forged and shaped by technology and industry. In my essay I want to show how twenty-first century Canadian and Nigerian writers have responded to the effects of oil mining in their respective countries by drawing on notions of the sublime as they came to be articulated by Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century and have been taken up by scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through their narrative and poetic ‘sublime oilscapes’ these authors effectively foreground the problems inherent in the split attitude of contemporary societies.