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Mark Whalan, “Oil Was Trumps”: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., World War I, and the Growth of the Petromodern State, American Literary History, Volume 29, Issue 3, Fall 2017, Pages 474–498, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajx023
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Abstract
This article argues that John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy is an important fictional consideration of an emergent era of “petromodernity,” one tied specifically to the changing models of collaboration between the US state and the oil industry that emerged during World War I. U.S.A. positions the major impact of World War I on American life as the long-term expansion of the US state, which as well as developing a new domestic security apparatus became increasingly involved in securing a global infrastructure of oil extraction and supply. U.S.A.’s formal innovations track oil’s increasingly central role in both military and civilian technology and infrastructure, and investigate the new models of sociability and subjectivity this new petroculture produced. The trilogy sees oil as a habitually occluded yet structuring force in American life, an energy source increasingly involved in the materialized politics of US infrastructure and also central to widespread understandings of liberation and personal sovereignty. Ultimately the trilogy questions whether petromodern fantasies of autonomy might in fact be recklessly and dangerously antisocial, even as it struggles to imagine alternatives in a society marked by the “invisibility of ubiquity” of oil.