Impasse Poetics at the Nordic Oil Coast

In Impasse Poetics at the Nordic Oil Coast, Karl Emil Rosenbaek Reetz examines the viscosity of our current bitumen foundation through the representation of oil as more than mere energy in Danish and Norwegian literature and culture from 1992 to today. The 1990s mark the beginning of institutionalized, supranational recognition of climate change with the initiation of the Conference of the Parties (COP, 1995), the UN Earth Summit of 1992, and the Kyoto Agreement of 1997. The last thirty years have seen a huge public and political increase in awareness of climate change, perfectly aligned with a huge increase in the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

In the quest for a greener future, the Nordic countries proclaim to be green frontier nations, yet Denmark and especially Norway also continue to extract natural gas and oil from the seabed of the North Sea and further North. This has led to a peculiar sense of oil impasse present in contemporary fiction from this region. The Nordic green frontier myth, it seems, does not instil the intelligentsia with a sense of accomplishment as much as a sense of despair.