“The Residual Landscape in Three Canadian Petrofictions of the Harper Decade.”

• Main Author: Omhovère, Claire
• Other Authors: Etudes montpelliéraines du monde anglophone (EMMA), Université Paul-Valéry - Montpellier 3 (UPVM), Hélène Ibata et Monica Manolescu
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: HAL CCSD 2022
• Subjects: Canadian literature; environmental humanities; petrocultures; [SHS]Humanities and Social Sciences; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://univ-montpellier3-paul-valery.hal.science/hal-04311322

International audience In 2007 the European Space Agency publishes a satellite photograph of the opening of the fabled Northwest Passage, “clearing a passage in the icescape and in the imagination that had been dreamt of, and searched for, over a century ago” (Yusoff 2011: 299). After “the year of the Great Melt” (Gillmor 2015: --), the second half of the Harper decade witnessed the publication of several novels in which oil takes center stage, bringing to an end the banishment of bitumen “from the preserves of serious fiction” (Ghosh 2016:11). The waning of oil finally turned oil into a matter of interest, the waning of oil and a dawning awareness of the impact of human activities on the environment. This essay will argue that growing concern for the irreversibility of the Anthropocene and the foretold end of fossil fuels have combined in English-Canadian literature to prompt new arrangements in the visual regime of landscape (see also Martin 2022: 78). It is these adjustments I propose to discuss looking at three novels published in the second half of the Harper decade: Will Ferguson’s 419 (2012), Fred Stenson’s Who by Fire (2014), and Don Gillmor’s Long Change (2015).