Literature of American Extraction: Oil, Coal, Class and Warfare

Come and listen you fellers so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortune in the dark dreary mines.
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul,
'Til the stream of your blood is as black as the coal

— Merle Travis, 1946

This course examines the political, economic, ecological, and affective legacies of fossil fuel extraction industries as articulated in modern and contemporary American and Indigenous literatures, especially poetry. We will examine how forms such as the novel, the work song, the blues, the documentary, the elegy, and a variety of other poetic forms structure and interrogate narratives of humanness, the natural world, and national identity: narratives that are inextricably linked to the extraction and processing of coal, oil, silica, and uranium.

Beginning after World War I with the rise of petroleum as the predominant modern fossil fuel, we will examine the material processes of coal mining, oil drilling, and the transportation of these resources via trains, trucks, and pipelines, and their impact on bodies, natural landscapes, built neighborhoods, and cultural imaginaries. We will also trace how the traffic in and desire for these substances undergirds regimes of racialization and white supremacy, indigenous relocations and resistance and issues related to immigration, in addition to structuring the most banal of our daily activities. This course will progress thematically as we begin to investigate the “petroliteratures” and other forms of writing produced by the devastatingly global and simultaneously intimate scale of these industries.

We begin with how coal mining, oil drilling, and work cultures around resource extraction were fundamental to conceptions of rural masculinity and American identity—reading works by Upton Sinclair, Breece D’J Pancake, Mark Nowak, and Muriel Rukeyser. We will contextualize this in the large archive of Native American and Canadian Indigenous literatures, performance art, and direct action around Unistʼotʼen and Standing Rock, reading works by Nick Estes, Audra Simpson, and Rebecca Belmore. We will build towards a globalized understanding of the fossil fuel economy and how it intersects with regimes of racialization and class stratification in the United States, as explored through poetic and literary material.


Students will be able to:

Discuss how literature produced of, about, and through fossil-fuel extractive industries engages questions of modernity, environmental politics, indigeneity, relationships to land, and notions of belonging and internationalism.

Engage, critique, and formulate their own opinion on a variety of literary, cultural, and historical approaches to understanding extractive economies, and to making sense of questions of scale and agency in relation to those things.

Identify how the history of particular literary forms in the United States such as the novel, the work song, the blues, the documentary, the elegy, and a variety of other poetic forms, is linked to and articulates the history of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. Students will have the opportunity to experiment creatively with producing texts in such forms.