The forces of fossil capital

Through the nineteenth century, Western industrial nations transitioned to fossil fuels following the formation of what Andreas Malm terms ‘fossil capital’, a distinct form of capitalism based on the extraction and consumption of coal, oil, and gas. In America, the industrial operations of fossil capital – in addition to igniting our contemporary climate crisis – reshaped society in the image of a productive engine through social applications of the thermodynamic principles of energy conservation and entropy. Through a reading of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), this essay considers American literary naturalism as an aesthetic response to the emergence of American fossil capital. It argues that Fredric Jameson’s understanding of naturalism as a narrative form that expresses class anxieties through an ‘entropic trajectory’ invites a thermodynamic interpretation of American naturalism which foregrounds its relationship to fossil capital’s environmental and socioeconomic transformations. The essay examines how Dreiser’s text naturalises the urbanisation, subjectivities, and class stratification of American fossil capital by framing each as a manifestation of thermodynamic principles. In doing so, this essay proposes a reconsideration of American literary naturalism that highlights the form’s ideological function in the establishment of a fossil-fuelled industrial middle class fixated on productivity

Epistemology · Ideology · Naturalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Global Energy and Sustainability Research · Law · Philosophy