Times, Myths and Machines: Literary Critiques of Oil’s Rationality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62876/baciyelmo.vi10.8405Keywords:
Oil fictions, Venezuelan literature, Science and technology studies, Environmental humanities, Energy HumanitiesAbstract
This article examines how two Venezuelan oil novels, Mene (1936) by Ramón Díaz Sánchez and Memorias de una antigua primavera (1989) by Milagros Mata Gil, challenge the epistemological assumptions underpinning the global oil economy. Confronting an industry accustomed to operating on temporal and spatial scales that render both human and nonhuman life invisible, these novels expose the «ways of seeing» that make oil legible while obscuring its social and ecological effects. Together, they demonstrate that faith in the objective neutrality of science and technology has always been entangled with fantasies and delusions that legitimize extractivism and ecological collapse. By recuperating this often-dismissed literary archive, the article argues that the Venezuelan oil novel offers critical insights for understanding the entanglements of petromodernity, technoscience, and myth in today’s planetary crisis.
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